DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE not defined

Question

I'm trying to start a project in Django, but I've come up against a wall right at the start. Whenever I run django-admin with no commands, I get this notice after the help message:

Note that only Django core commands are listed as settings are not properly configured (error: Requested setting INSTALLED_APPS, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.).

And whenever I try to run it or manage.py with a command such as runserver, I get:

python manage.py runserver
Traceback (most recent call last):


File "manage.py", line 22, in <module>
    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 363, in execute_from_command_line
    utility.execute()
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 355, in execute
    self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 283, in run_from_argv
    self.execute(*args, **cmd_options)
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/commands/runserver.py", line 62, in execute
    super(Command, self).execute(*args, **options)
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 330, in execute
    output = self.handle(*args, **options)
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/management/commands/runserver.py", line 73, in handle
    if not settings.DEBUG and not settings.ALLOWED_HOSTS:
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 56, in __getattr__
    self._setup(name)
  File "/home/castro/Code/django_tests/tutorial/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 39, in _setup
    % (desc, ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE))
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting DEBUG, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

I don't know how to define this DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE nor where to call settings.configure(). I've tried what some other answers here suggested, but either it's a different problem, or I'm missing something that should be quite obvious.

Answer 1

Near the top of your manage.py file, you should see this line, where project is the name of your project which contains the settings file.

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "project.settings")

If the project does not exist, or the path is wrong, python manage.py will fail.

The file tree should look something like this

.
├── manage.py
├── project
│   ├── settings.py

For context, a generated manage.py contains the following lines

if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "project.settings")
# ... other code ...

Answer 2

You may use the suggested solution of an env variable in the exception - DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE.

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="project.settings"