How to set up Django development environment without installing?

Question

Hi, I'm a student and the lab staff has set up permissions that won't students install software on the machines (or to our profiles).

I'm curious how I can develop Django application in a contained environment. I checked out the Django trunk to my Ubuntu home directory and added the bin path to my .bashrc. But when I try to use django-admin.py, an error occurs:

ImportError: No module named django.core

I'm quite confident this is simply a path issue. My real question is whether there's a proper to do self-contained development or if I need to manually add paths, and which if so.

In advance, thanks.

Answer 1

You can manually set the path:

import sys
sys.path.append('/home/kevin/dir_with_module')

You may also want to look into setting up a virtual environment. This article has good information: http://clemesha.org/blog/2009/jul/05/modern-python-hacker-tools-virtualenv-fabric-pip/