Running a Python script outside of Django

Question

I have a script which uses the Django ORM features, amongst other external libraries, that I want to run outside of Django (that is, executed from the command-line).

Edit: At the moment, I can launch it by navigating to a URL...

How do I setup the environment for this?

Answer 1

from <Project path>          import settings          #your project settings file
from django.core.management  import setup_environment

setup_environ(settings)

#Rest of your django imports and code go here

Answer 2

All you need is importable settings and properly set python path. In the most raw form this can be done by setting up appropriate environment variables, like:

$ DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myproject.settings PYTHONPATH=$HOME/djangoprojects python myscript.py

There are other ways, like calling settings.configure() and already mentioned setup_environ() described by James Bennett in some blog post.

Answer 3

The easiest way to do this is to set up your script as a manage.py subcommand. It's quite easy to do:

from django.core.management.base import NoArgsCommand

class Command(NoArgsCommand):

    help = "Whatever you want to print here"

    option_list = NoArgsCommand.option_list + (
        make_option('--verbose', action='store_true'),
    )

    def handle_noargs(self, **options):
        ... call your script here ...

Put this in a file, in any of your apps under management/commands/yourcommand.py (with empty __init__.py files in each) and now you can call your script with ./manage.py yourcommand.