Django Installed Apps Location

Question

Hi,

I am an experienced PHP programmer using Django for the first time, and I think it is incredible!

I have a project that has a lot of apps, so I wanted to group them in an apps folder.

So the structure of the project is:

/project/
/project/apps/
/project/apps/app1/
/project/apps/app2

Then in Django settings I have put this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'project.apps.app1',
    'project.apps.app2',
)

This does not seem to work?

Any ideas on how you can put all your apps into a seprate folder and not in the project root?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

As long as your apps are in your PYTHONPATH, everything should work. Try setting that environment variable to the folder containing your apps.

PYTHONPATH="/path/to/your/apps/dir/:$PYTHONPATH"

Answer 2

Your top-level urls.py (also named in your settings.py) must be able to use a simple "import" statement to get your applications.

Does import project.apps.app1.urls work? If not, then your PYTHONPATH isn't set up properly, or you didn't install your project in Python's site-packages directory.

I suggest using the PYTHONPATH environment variable, instead of installing into site-packages. Django applications (to me, anyway) seem easier to manage when outside site-packages.

We do the following:

• Django projects go in /opt/project/.

• PYTHONPATH includes /opt/project.

• Our settings.py uses apps.this and apps.that (note that the project part of the name is part of the PYTHONPATH, not part of the import.

Answer 3

Make sure that the '__init__.py' file is in your apps directory, if it's not there it won't be recognized as part of the package.

So each of the folders here should have '__init__.py' file in it. (empty is fine).

/project/
/project/apps/
/project/apps/app1/
/project/apps/app2

Then as long as your root 'module' folder is in your PYTHONPATH you'll be able to import from your apps.

Here's the documentation regarding the python search path for your reading pleasure:

http://docs.python.org/install/index.html#modifying-python-s-search-path

And a nice simple explanation of what __init__.py file is for:

http://effbot.org/pyfaq/what-is-init-py-used-for.htm