Why do I need the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE set?

Question

Every time I log on to my server through SSH I need to type the following:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings

if I do not any usage of the

Answer 1

Yourmanage.py is referencing an application (notifications). This forces Django to complain about DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE being set because the Django environment hasn't been set up yet.

Incidentally, you can force the enviroment setup manually, but honestly I wouldn't do this in manage.py. That's not really a good practice in my opinion.

Here is how you can manually setup the Django environment from within any app (or program for that matter):

# set up the environment using the settings module
from django.core.management import setup_environ
from myapp import settings
setup_environ(settings)