How to access Django settings?

[nedbat]

When using other coverage commands (like coverage html), the Django settings may not be set properly. For example, these commands:

coverage run manage.py test ; coverage html

manage.py will set the settings properly, but coverage html won't know where they are.
Should we require the user to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE? Should we make it so the settings aren't required?

[jessamynsmith]

If I simply run in my usual virtualenv environment, I get errors like the following:

$ coverage report
Coverage.py warning: Setting timid=True to support plugins.
Name                                                                  Stmts   Miss Branch BrPart  Cover
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eggtimer/libs/email_sender.py                                             8      5      2      0    30%
eggtimer/templates/base.html   ImportError: Could not import settings 'eggtimer.settings.development' (Is it on sys.path? Is there an import error in the settings file?): No module named 'eggtimer'

I can work around this by setting PYTHONPATH:

$ export PYTHONPATH=.
(eggtimer3)~/Development/eggtimer$ coverage report
Coverage.py warning: Setting timid=True to support plugins.
Name                                                                  Stmts   Miss Branch BrPart  Cover
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eggtimer/libs/email_sender.py                                             8      5      2      0    30%
eggtimer/templates/base.html                                             39     23      0      0    41%

It also works, without PYTHONPATH, if I invoke coverage via python:

$ python -m coverage report
Coverage.py warning: Setting timid=True to support plugins.
Name                                                                  Stmts   Miss Branch BrPart  Cover
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
eggtimer/libs/email_sender.py                                             8      5      2      0    30%
eggtimer/templates/base.html                                             39     23      0      0    41%

[perror]

In my humble opinion, it would be much more easy to use if a default DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is selected at first (e.g. the one from the current project).

[nedbat]

@perror I'm not sure what you mean. What is the default DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE?

[perror]

@nedbat In fact, I need to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULES to myapp.settings to make the plugin work. It would be more convenient if a default value could be set to it (I have no idea how to achieve this though...). But, anyway, it is not really important because it works once it is configured, so it is not really an issue.

[gergelypolonkai]

Doesn’t calling django.setup() do this for you?

[nedbat]

@gergelypolonkai I'll admit to being a little confused. I need to do some more tests on real Django projects. Anyone who can provide data points, I am grateful!

[gergelypolonkai]

I take this back; DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE must be set for this. However, wsgi.py and thus the manage.py runserver command sets it to a sane default, and in a gunicorn/Apache/whatever environment you use the former one.

Still, django.setup(), or at least settings.configure() should be called befora accessing the config (see #16 which solves somewhat the same issue).

[PamelaM]

+1 for setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. Our situation is way more complicated since we have three projects that intimately share the same code tree. Each project has it's own settings, so there are some templates in project A that aren't accessed in project L and visa-versa.

It would be miraculous if we could specify a list of settings to find all templates, but we're happy with just getting full template coverage on all of A and any L templates that are also in A's directories

[sergei-maertens]

One thing I noticed is that for coveralls the PYTHONPATH trick is required, while settings DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is enough for codecov. For Travis, I just export both env vars before submitting the coverage to Coveralls/Codecov

[jambonrose]

Closing this issue: setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is documented in the Read Me.