Skip to main content

Django: Executing manage.py from Anywhere

One nice convenience would be to have a way to call manage.py from anywhere within a virtual environment.  For example, if I want to execute 'manage.py shell', it would be nice to be able to execute that from anywhere rather than having to change directory to where manage.py lives.

We can already run management commands from anywhere using django-admin by utilizing the --settings flag, but doing this requires a lot of typing. And wrapping the django-admin in a shell script seems inelegant somehow.

Instead, I wrote a small python script based off of manage.py.  This can be placed in the ./bin directory in the virtualenv.  The DjangoManageSettings object is meant to be customized on a per project basis, and I intend to make it so it can be passed in from a file configuration somewhere.

Anyway, thought I would share.  I'm curious to see other approaches to this.

# ---------- ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/bin/django_manage.py -------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env python

import os, sys
from django.core.management import execute_manager


class DjangoManageSettings(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.VENV_ROOT = os.getenv("VIRTUAL_ENV")
        # The name of the module that settings.py resides in
        self.PROJECT_NAME="myproject"
        # The path to the directory where the Django project lives. 
        # I made it relative to the virtualenv root. 
        self.PROJECT_PARENT_PATH = os.path.join(self.VENV_ROOT, "app")
        # The name of the django settings model in the project
        self.SETTINGS_MODULE_NAME='settings'


dm_settings = DjangoManageSettings()

if not dm_settings.VENV_ROOT:
    print("A virtual environment must be activated before using this script.")
    exit(1)


sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(dm_settings.PROJECT_PARENT_PATH))
mod = __import__(dm_settings.PROJECT_NAME, globals(), locals(), 
                 [dm_settings.SETTINGS_MODULE_NAME])
settings = getattr(mod, dm_settings.SETTINGS_MODULE_NAME)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    execute_manager(settings)
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 7, 2011 at 9:03 AM

    You don't really have to pass the settings module as argument for `django-admin.py` on each call. Command `django-admin.py` also looks for the environment variable `DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE` to locate your settings module. And thus every virtualenv have a script named `activate` which gets invoked when activating the virtualenv, you can simple export `DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE` with the proper value.

    `django-admin.py` even allows you to use other names for your settings module than "settings". I maintain a separate settings module for each environment e.g. "project.settings.devel", "project.settings.prod".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Joe JasinskiJune 7, 2011 at 1:20 PM

    Thanks the advice - didn't think of using the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE, but that seems like a simpler solution. (To get this to work, I also needed to put my project on the Python Path.)
    Thank you again, Joe

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Docker: Run as non root user

It's good practice to run processes within a container as a non-root user with restricted permissions.  Even though containers are isolated from the host operating system, they do share the same kernel as the host. Also, processes within a container should be prevented from writing to where they shouldn't be allowed to as extra protection against exploitation. Running a Docker process as a non-root user has been a Docker feature as of version 1.10. To run a Docker process as a non-root user, permissions need to be accounted for meticulously.  This permission adjustment needs to be done when building a Dockerfile. You need to be aware of where in the filesystem your app might write to, and adjust the permissions accordingly.  Since everything in a container is considered disposable, the container process really shouldn't be writing to too many locations once build. Here is an annotated example of how you might create a Dockerfile where the process that runs within runs a
8 comments
Read more

Django: Using Caching to Track Online Users

Recently I wanted a simple solution to track whether a user is online on a given Django site.  The definition of "online" on a site is kind of ambiguous, so I'll define that a user is considered to be online if they have made any request to the site in the last five minutes. I found that one approach is to use Django's caching framework to track when a user last accessed the site.  For example, upon each request, I can have a middleware set the current time as a cache value associated with a given user.  This allows us to store some basic information about logged-in user's online state without having to hit the database on each request and easily retrieve it by accessing the cache. My approach below.  Comments welcome. In settings.py: # add the middleware that you are about to create to settings MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = ( .... 'middleware.activeuser_middleware.ActiveUserMiddleware' , .... ) # Setup caching per Django docs. In actuality, you
17 comments
Read more

uWSGI Basic Django Setup

Here are two basic examples of almost the same uWSGI configuration to run a Django project; one is configured via an ini configuration file and the other is configured via a command line argument. This does not represent a production-ready example, but can be used as a starting point for the configuration. Setup for this example: # create dir for virtualenv and activate mkdir envs/ virtualenv envs/runrun/ . ./envs/runrun/bin/activate # create dir for project codebase mkdir proj/ # install some django deps pip install django uwsgi whitenose # create a new django project cd proj/ django-admin startproject runrun cd runrun/ # Add to or modify django settings.py to setup static file serving with Whitenoise. # Note: for prod environments, staticfiles can be served via Nginx. # settings.py  MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [     ....     'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware', ] STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles') STATICFILES_STORAGE =
1 comment
Read more