custom django-admin commands - AttributeError: 'Command' object has no attribute 'stdout'

Question

Following the example of writing a custom django-admin command here, I've created the following custom command:

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError

class Command(BaseCommand):
    args = ''
    help = 'Test command'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        self.stdout.write("Hello World!")

Surprisingly, I receive the following stack trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\My Documents\Dev\MyProject\svn\trunk\dj_project\manage.py", line 11, in <module>
    execute_manager(settings)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\__init__.py", line 438, in execute_manager
    utility.execute()
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\__init__.py", line 379, in execute
    self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\base.py", line 191, in run_from_argv
    self.execute(*args, **options.__dict__)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django\core\management\base.py", line 218, in execute
    output = self.handle(*args, **options)
  File "D:\My Documents\Dev\MyProject\svn\trunk\dj_project\..\dj_project\dj_app\management\commands\mytest.py", line 8, in handle
    self.stdout.write("Hello World!")
AttributeError: 'Command' object has no attribute 'stdout'

How come? This is a very basic custom command that as far as I understand conforms to the example.

I'm using django 1.2.1

Answer 1

It looks like the mapping to self.stdout is a very new change in Django's trunk version, committed in May. If you're running the 1.2 release or earlier, this won't work - and you should be using the earlier documentation.