Integrating GeoDjango into existing Django project

Question

I have a Django project with multiple apps. They all share a db with engine = django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2. Now I want some functionality of GeoDjango and decided I want to integrate it into my existing project. I read through the tutorial, and it looks like I have to create a separate spartial database for GeoDjango. I wonder if there is anyway around. I tried to add this into one of my apps' models.py without changing my db settings :

from django.contrib.gis.db.models import PointField

class Location(models.Model):
        location = PointField()

But when I run syncdb, I got this error.

File "/home/virtual/virtual-env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/contrib/gis/db/models/fields.py", line 200, in db_type
    return connection.ops.geo_db_type(self)

Answer 1

Actually, as i recall, django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis is extension of postgresql_psycopg2 so you could change db driver in settings, create new db with spatial template and then migrate data to new db (South is great for this). By itself geodjango is highly dependent on DB inner methods thus, unfortunately, you couldn't use it with regular db.

Other way - you could make use of django's multi-db ability, and create extra db for geodjango models.