[Answered ]-Django: manage.py works fine but django-admin fails

You are most likely seeing this error because some environment variables are not set, or set incorrectly. I would check to make sure that your PYTHONPATH, and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE are all pointing to the correct locations.

PYTHONPATH is used to specify additional directories for Python to look for things to use. I think you’ll want to set it to the directory which contains your manage.py script.

However, you can do everything that you need to do with manage.py