Django - The included urlconf doesn't have any patterns in it

Question

My website, which was working before, suddenly started breaking with the error

ImproperlyConfigured at / The included urlconf resume.urls doesn't have any patterns in it

The project base is called resume. In settings.py I have set

ROOT_URLCONF = 'resume.urls' 

Here's my resume.urls, which sits in the project root directory.

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *  # Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin: from django.contrib import admin admin.autodiscover()  urlpatterns = patterns('',     # Example:     # (r'^resume/', include('resume.foo.urls')),      # Uncomment the admin/doc line below and add 'django.contrib.admindocs'      # to INSTALLED_APPS to enable admin documentation:     (r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),      # Uncomment the next line to enable the admin:     (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),      (r'^accounts/login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login'),       #(r'^employer/', include(students.urls)),      (r'^ajax/', include('urls.ajax')),     (r'^student/', include('students.urls')),     (r'^club/(?P<object_id>\d+)/$', 'resume.students.views.club_detail'),     (r'^company/(?P<object_id>\d+)/$', 'resume.students.views.company_detail'),     (r'^program/(?P<object_id>\d+)/$', 'resume.students.views.program_detail'),     (r'^course/(?P<object_id>\d+)/$', 'resume.students.views.course_detail'),     (r'^career/(?P<object_id>\d+)/$', 'resume.students.views.career_detail'),      (r'^site_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': 'C:/code/django/resume/media'}),  ) 

I have a folder called urls and a file ajax.py inside. (I also created a blank init.py in the same folder so that urls would be recognized.) This is ajax.py.

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *  urlpatterns = patterns('',     (r'^star/(?P<object_id>\d+)$', 'resume.students.ajax-calls.star'), ) 

Anyone know what's wrong? This is driving me crazy.

Thanks,

Answer 1

TL;DR: You probably need to use reverse_lazy() instead of reverse()

If your urls.py imports a class-based view that uses reverse(), you will get this error; using reverse_lazy() will fix it.

For me, the error

The included urlconf project.urls doesn't have any patterns in it

got thrown because:

• project.urls imported app.urls
• app.urls imported app.views
• app.views had a class-based view that used reverse
• reverse imports project.urls, resulting in a circular dependency.

Using reverse_lazy instead of reverse solved the problem: this postponed the reversing of the url until it was first needed at runtime.

Moral: Always use reverse_lazy if you need to reverse before the app starts.

Answer 2

Check your patterns for include statements that point to non-existent modules or modules that do not have a urlpatterns member. I see that you have an include('urls.ajax') which may not be correct. Should it be ajax.urls?