[Django]-Django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting USE_I18N, but settings are not configured

It happens to me too, I just now found unintentional.

I changed “configuration” in top of PyCharm IDE so pycharm confused when try to run django code. Exactly the problem popup when I try to run server with shortcut but when I used terminal to run server, I found django code not having any problem and pycharm can’t found setting.

So please check “configuration” in top pycharm’s ide maybe you do same mistake

I’m new in django so be calm if my answer was silly.

I had this problem because I tried to import a django script after just typing

python

instead of

python manage.py shell

Duh!

Problem

I had the same error with Django==3.2 and djangorestframework==3.12.4 (2021/04) when I ran unittest. In my case, the python manage.py test works properly but I cannot directly run or debug the test module which was in a specific app, and I get this error:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting INSTALLED_APPS, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

Solution

First I added the django project root to the sys.path. Then I added DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to the environment variable to address the project setting root and called the Django setup function. This is my code:

from os import path, environ
from sys import path as sys_path
from django import setup

sys_path.append(<path to django setting.py>)    
environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'django_project.settings')
setup()

put this in top of settings.py
this will configure django for you

import os
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", __file__)
import django
django.setup()

I had the same error with Django 3.0.8 (july 2020) when trying to run the server, and in my case no need for the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. The solution is to use another form to run the server:

cd <directory containing manage.py>
python3 manage.py runserver

It works to run Django shell too :

python3 manage.py shell

Like raratiru answered, you need DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable defined with the relative pythonic path to your setting file.

OR use your django-admin command with the settings parameter:

django-admin --settings=mysite.settings dbshell

Below code in terminal to manually inform which settings I am using worked for me:

set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings

Dear all I faced the same problem and i scrapped the web to find a solution. None of the one above solved anything.

The issue in my case was related to a wrong configuration of pycharm. As for someone above the app didnt have any issue when launched from the command line/ shell.

The issue is here:

For some reason the env variable disappeared. i added back and everything started to work again without any issue.