django-admin.py is not working properly

Question

I have just spotted that something is wrong with my django-admin.py command. I checked similar SO posts on django-admin.py problems but nothing seems to be related to my problem. I use Windows Vista (yeah, I know...). I also have many versions of django in some folder on my disk and I switch to the version I need using junction command (this is similar to symlinking in unix), I don't have problems with this and never had problems before.

I used django-admin.py many times before but now for some unknown reasons I got this info (Django 1.1.1):

C:\>django-admin.py startproject some_project
Type 'django-admin.py help' for usage.

and suprisingly when I type what django asked me to type:

C:\>django-admin.py help
Type 'django-admin.py help' for usage.

????

When I switch to Django 1.2.1 I got this:

C:\>django-admin.py startproject help
Usage: django-admin.py subcommand [options] [args]

Options:
  -v VERBOSITY, --verbosity=VERBOSITY
                        Verbosity level; 0=minimal output, 1=normal output,
                        2=all output
  --settings=SETTINGS   The Python path to a settings module, e.g.
                        "myproject.settings.main". If this isn't provided, the
                        DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable will be
                        used.
  --pythonpath=PYTHONPATH
                        A directory to add to the Python path, e.g.
                        "/home/djangoprojects/myproject".
  --traceback           Print traceback on exception
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Type 'django-admin.py help <subcommand>' for help on a specific subcommand.

Available subcommands:
  cleanup
  compilemessages
  createcachetable
  ...
  startproject
  ...
  validate

no matter if I type startproject help or startproject some_name it always shows the same message.

Any ideas?

EDIT: new info

I've just noticed that my command line arguments are not visible when command is parsed by django managament utlity (when I print command argv it shows only path to django-admin.py without any of given arguments)

Answer 1

The problem in my case was the I've lost .py file association rules.

If you have similar problem you can check in command line what is the result of:

assoc .py

If there is no such association you need to create it:

assoc .py=Python.File

and create rule for Python.File:

ftype Python.File="c:\python27\python.exe" "%1" %*

(Replace with whatever the path is to your python interpretter.)

now django-admin.py accepts command line args and everything works fine!

Answer 2

This would be better as it does not require touching the registry at all:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10732170/1585863