I was trying the official tutorial of Django because I want to learn it. I run Archlinux 4.10.11-1 64 bits.
First, I created a folder named djangoapp where I set my virtual environment:
$ virtualenv djangoapp
I set my current directory to this folder, and then I activated it:
$ source bin/activate
And I installed Django after:
$ pip install django
Following the tutorial, I ran:
$ django-admin startproject djangoapp
And set my current directory to djangoapp, and ran:
$ python manage.py runserver
But I'm getting the following error:
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.
Indeed, running env | grep DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE gets me the following result:
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=
So I tried to set it manually:
$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='djangoapp.settings'
Running $ python manage.py runserver now works, but $ django-admin help now gets me the following error:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'djangoapp'
What did I do wrong? Thanks for your help!
PS: $ python --version gets me Python 3.6.1.
I think the docs could be a little clearer about this, but django-admin is typically only used for running django-admin startproject and manage.py is used for the rest e.g. ./manage.py runserver, ./manage.py migrate etc.
Deleting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable should allow you to run both ./manage.py * and django-admin startproject commands when inside the djangoapp folder.
I'm not sure how to do this on Archlinux, but something like unset DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or set -e DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should work.
Further info: you can think of manage.py as a wrapper around django-admin that automatically sets the PYTHONPATH and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variables. Therefore, once inside the project, you can just use ./manage.py rather than django-admin to run the management commands.