raise ImportError(“Could not import settings ‘%s’ (Is it on sys.path? Does it have syntax errors?): %s” % (self.SETTINGS_MODULE, e))
ImportError: Could not import settings ‘mysite.settings’ (Is it on sys.path? Does it have syntax errors?): No module named mysite.settings

—-
I can run
$ python manage.py shell –settings=mysite.settings
and the shell runs just fine. Any ideas?

I’m on Python 2.6.6, Django 1.2.3 and Ubuntu 10.10 by the way

I don’t know if you’ll see this at this point, but since this page is still linked to by the Django wiki, I figure it’s worth spelling things out here in the comments.

I’m guessing that you have screwed up the quotes, as alluded to by chris berkholtz as a potential issue.

In other words, are you using single quotes around what you’re setting PROJECT to? That’s what your error suggests to me.

Instead, use backquotes (generally, the unshifted tilde, aka the key next to one on standard us-querty layouts). The backquote tells the shell, “Please replace this with the standard output of the content within.” Since the command you’re passing is python w/ the –c option, it’ll execute the arg to –c as a script. This makes *exactly* how one uses quotes throughout all this a bit complex, and is an obvious potential pitfall for those who are newer to bash scripting to fall into.

Another one that I’ve run into along the way is making sure that the parent directory of my django projects is included in my PYTHONPATH.

BTW, my suggested script is more akin to Don’s. Franck’s will fail if the user isn’t calling it from the project directory, & I prefer to be able to use it from the app directories as well.

My directory structure is that I always put projects under site folders which are under my src directory. So, the following works for me:

#!/bin/bash
PROJECT=‘python –c “import os;print os.getcwd().partition(‘src’)[2].split(os.sep)[2]”‘
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=$PROJECT.settings vim

The PROJECT line’s quotes are backtick, double, single, single, double, backtick, for those attempting to play along at home. Adjust the tuple indices & the arg to partition as appropriate for one’s own directory structure.

When I try to run that script I get:
ImportError: Could not import settings ‘python –c “import os; print os.path.base
name(os.getcwd())”.settings’ (Is it on sys.path? Does it have syntax errors?): No module named python –c “import os; print os.path.basename(os.getcwd())”.settings

Any suggestions?