Standalone Django application with pyinstaller on Windows - django

Question

I need to package a (rather simple) django application into a standalone executable on windows. After some failed attempts with py2exe (I really don't understand why everybody recommends it for django, it seems extremely complicated to set up) I tried pyinstaller. It does package the application without complaining, but if I try to run it using myapp.exe runserver localhost:8000, I am getting the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 5, in <module>
File "c:\python27\lib\site-packages\PyInstaller-2.1-py2.7.egg\PyInstaller\loader\pyi_importers.py", line 270, in load_
module
exec(bytecode, module.__dict__)
File "...\build\ck\out00-PYZ.pyz\django.test", line 5, in <module>
File "c:\python27\lib\site-packages\PyInstaller-2.1-py2.7.egg\PyInstaller\loader\pyi_importers.py", line 270, in load_
module
exec(bytecode, module.__dict__)
File "...\build\ck\out00-PYZ.pyz\django.test.client", line 21, in <module>
File "c:\python27\lib\site-packages\PyInstaller-2.1-py2.7.egg\PyInstaller\loader\pyi_importers.py", line 270, in load_
module
exec(bytecode, module.__dict__)
File "...\build\ck\out00-PYZ.pyz\django.db", line 11, in <module>
File "...\build\ck\out00-PYZ.pyz\django.conf", line 52, in __getattr__
File "...\build\ck\out00-PYZ.pyz\django.conf", line 45, in _setup
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting DATABASES, but settings are not configured. You must eith
er define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.
My manage.py script looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
import Cookie
import django.test
import HTMLParser
from django.conf import settings
if __name__ == "__main__":
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "myapp.settings")
from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
Why does it not recognize the environment variable and how can I fix that?

Answer 1

I solved it by importing django.test after the line
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "myapp.settings")