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

By default, manage.py looks for a settings module in the same directory as itself. If it doesn't find one, it bombs out with a message to use django-admin.py instead. It doesn't actually set up the environemnt until it runs execute_manager. If you need to run your hooks before calling your management functions, the practice I've seen suggested is to put them in the relevant app's models.py.