[Django]-Alternative to the deprecated setup_environ() for one-off django scripts?

To expand on miki725’s answer, if before you had

from django.core.management import setup_environ

import fooproject.settings as settings
setup_environ(settings)

just replace with

import os

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "fooproject.settings")
from django.conf import settings

and your settings will loaded as settings.

For Django 1.7+, see the solution from Ben Davis.

Django 1.4 release notes officially recommend to use django.conf.settings.configure() to set the settings. This is nice for small scripts for which you need to do everything the “pythonic” way. If however you have a bigger project, I like to use the Django approach which is to have a separate settings module/package and then its path in DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. This is the approach which is used in manage.py:

# manage.py

# ...
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "fooproject.settings")
# ...

Release docs can be found here.

To add to what Leandro N said (thank you, Leandro!), you have to add django.setup().

For example, my code:

import os, django
os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'myproject.settings')
django.setup()
from app.models import ModelA, ModelB

FYI, I’m on Django 1.10.

I am using Django 2.0 and Ben Davis is close but I could not get it to work. What seems to have worked for me is

import os
import sys
import django

sys.path.append("/path/to/django/project") #only required if project not already in path
os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE','myapp.settings')

django.setup() #run django.setup BEFORE importing modules to setup the environ
from myapp.models import Thingy

t=Thingly.objects.all()

print(t)

Disclaimer: I’m using Django 1.8

Just adding my 2 cents: I’ve tried some of the solutions presented in this page, but they did’t worked at all. I just came up with a solution that I’m sharing below.

Make sure you are in the root folder of your project. The same where manage.py is located.

#make sure basic imports are in place
>>> import os,django

#set the specific django settings file
>>> os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "main.settings.base")

# import your modules and use them just like you do in your
# web apps
>>> from apps.customers import models as c

# normal usage... for instance:
>>> dir(c)
['You', 'Will', 'See', 'Your', 'Models', ... ]