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)