Use Django ORM as standalone [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Use only some parts of Django?
Using only the DB part of Django

I want to use the Django ORM as standalone. Despite an hour of searching Google, I'm still left with several questions:

• Does it require me to set up my Python project with a setting.py, /myApp/ directory, and modules.py file?
• Can I create a new models.py and run syncdb to have it automatically setup the tables and relationships or can I only use models from existing Django projects?
• There seems to be a lot of questions regarding PYTHONPATH. If you're not calling existing models is this needed?

I guess the easiest thing would be for someone to just post a basic template or walkthrough of the process, clarifying the organization of the files e.g.:

db/    __init__.py    settings.py    myScript.py orm/    __init__.py    models.py 

And the basic essentials:

# settings.py from django.conf import settings  settings.configure(      DATABASE_ENGINE   = "postgresql_psycopg2",      DATABASE_HOST     = "localhost",      DATABASE_NAME     = "dbName",      DATABASE_USER     = "user",      DATABASE_PASSWORD = "pass",      DATABASE_PORT     = "5432" )  # orm/models.py # ...  # myScript.py # import models.. 

And whether you need to run something like: django-admin.py inspectdb ...

(Oh, I'm running Windows if that changes anything regarding command-line arguments.).

Answer 1

Ah ok I figured it out and will post the solutions for anyone attempting to do the same thing.

This solution assumes that you want to create new models.

First create a new folder to store your files. We'll call it "standAlone". Within "standAlone", create the following files:

__init__.py myScript.py settings.py 

Obviously "myScript.py" can be named whatever.

Next, create a directory for your models.

We'll name our model directory "myApp", but realize that this is a normal Django application within a project, as such, name it appropriately to the collection of models you are writing.

Within this directory create 2 files:

__init__.py models.py 

Your going to need a copy of manage.py from an either an existing Django project or you can just grab a copy from your Django install path:

django\conf\project_template\manage.py 

Copy the manage.py to your /standAlone directory. Ok so you should now have the following structure:

\standAlone     __init__.py     myScript.py     manage.py     settings.py \myApp     __init__.py     models.py 

Add the following to your myScript.py file:

# settings.py from django.conf import settings  settings.configure(     DATABASE_ENGINE    = "postgresql_psycopg2",     DATABASE_NAME      = "myDatabase",     DATABASE_USER      = "myUsername",     DATABASE_PASSWORD  = "myPassword",     DATABASE_HOST      = "localhost",     DATABASE_PORT      = "5432",     INSTALLED_APPS     = ("myApp") )  from django.db import models from myApp.models import * 

and add this to your settings.py file:

    DATABASE_ENGINE    = "postgresql_psycopg2"     DATABASE_NAME      = "myDatabase"     DATABASE_USER      = "myUsername"     DATABASE_PASSWORD  = "myPassword"     DATABASE_HOST      = "localhost"     DATABASE_PORT      = "5432",     INSTALLED_APPS     = ("myApp") 

and finally your myApp/models.py:

# myApp/models.py from django.db import models  class MyModel(models.Model):      field = models.CharField(max_length=255) 

and that's it. Now to have Django manage your database, in command prompt navigate to our /standalone directory and run:

manage.py sql MyApp