[Answered ]-How to properly import django project settings to interact with app's ORM?

Before running the program, please set PYTHONPATH variable to include your django project dir.

Suppose you have you django project in:
/home/anon/mydjangoproject

Then, before running your application, ensure you have:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/anon/mydjangoproject

These examples work in a Linux shell, please do a similar system environment variable setting for any other operating system.

I have faced the same problem while trying to build a background schedule cron job on Django 1.10.0

I fixed the issue by declaring the following on the top of the standalone script

import os, django
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE","myapp.settings")
django.setup()
#continue with the rest of your code

Hope this will fix the issue. It worked for me.

This is a project level connection

import os

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'project.settings')

application = get_wsgi_application()

from app.model import ModelName
orm = ModelName.objects.all()
print(orm)

Next you can import models and execute django orm’s ,
It was tested in django 1.11.6

Thanks…..!