Skip to content

Entries published on September 22, 2007

1 entry published on this date. See also: all entries published in September 2007, full archive.

Standalone Django scripts

In the grand tradition of providing answers to frequently-asked questions from the django-users mailing list and the #django IRC channel, I’d like to tackle something that’s fast becoming the most frequently-asked question: how do you write standalone scripts which make use of Django components?

At first glance, this isn’t a terribly hard thing to do: Django’s just plain Python, and all of its components can — in theory — be imported and used just like any other Python modules. But the thing that trips most people up is the need, in most parts of Django, to supply some settings Django can use so it’ll know things like which database to connect to, which applications are available, where it can find templates, etc.

Depending on exactly what you need to do, there are several ways you can approach this problem, so let’s run through each of them in turn.

Set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE before you run

The …

Entry published September 22, 2007. Read full entry.