The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty on Celery worker run

Question

Django version 1.9.7.

My current project structure is:

vehicles/
├── etl
│   ├── etl
│   ├── manage.py
│   ├── pipeline
│   └── bku
└── web
    ├── db.sqlite3
    ├── manage.py
    ├── profiles
    ├── projects
    ├── reverse
    ├── static
    ├── templates
    ├── bku
    │   ├── admin.py
    │   ├── admin.pyc
    │   ├── apps.py
    │   ├── migrations
    │   ├── models.py
    │   ├── static
    │   ├── templates
    │   ├── tests.py
    │   ├── urls.py
    │   ├── views.py
    │   └── views.pyc
    └── rocket
        ├── celery.py
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── settings
        │   ├── base.py
        │   ├── dev.py
        │   ├── __init__.py
        │   ├── local.py
        │   ├── production.py
        │   ├── test.py
        ├── urls.py
        ├── wsgi.py

Now I want to use Celery in the bku Django app. But when I run the worker celery -A rocket worker -l info I get the following error django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty.. I have the SECRET_KEY defined and I didn't have this error before trying Celery.

How can I run the worker?

rocket/celery.py

from __future__ import absolute_import, unicode_literals
import os
from celery import Celery

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'rocket.settings')
app = Celery('rocket')
app.config_from_object('django.conf:settings', namespace='CELERY')
app.autodiscover_tasks()

@app.task(bind=True)
def debug_task(self):
    print('Request: {0!r}'.format(self.request))

rocket/init.py

from __future__ import absolute_import, unicode_literals
from .celery import app as celery_app

__all__ = ['bku']

Answer 1

The error message is a bit misleading—usually when you see an ImproperlyConfigured exception like that it means that Django can't find your settings file.

In your case you're setting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to rocket.settings, but from your directory structure it looks like it should instead be something like rocket.settings.production.