Using Django models in external python script

You need to write a custom management command, instead of doing these weird acrobatics.

Create a module called management (in other words, create a directory management and inside it create an empty __init__.py file) inside the directory of any app that you have listed in INSTALLED_APPS. So if you have myapp, you would create:

myapp
 |
 > management
 | | __init__.py
 > models.py
 > views.py

Then in the management directory, create another module commands and in it create a file which is the name of your command; for example my_command.py, like this:

myapp
 |
 > management
 | | __init__.py
 | | commands
 | | | __init__.py
 | | | my_command.py
 > models.py
 > views.py

In my_command.py, write this boilerplate code:

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from myapp.models import MyModel

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Does some magical work'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        """ Do your work here """
        self.stdout.write('There are {} things!'.format(MyModel.objects.count()))

Once you save the file, you'll be able to do python manage.py my_command and it will have access to all your models and settings.

If you need to run it as a daemon, Daniel Roseman wrote django-initd which does exactly that. Once you have installed it:

from django.core.management.base import CommandError
from daemon_command import DaemonCommand
from myapp.models import MyModel

class Command(DaemonCommand):
    help = 'Does some magical work'

    def loop_callback(self, *args, **options):
        """ Do your work here """
        self.stdout.write('There are {} things!'.format(MyModel.objects.count()))

Once you have that done from the github readme:

The important parts of such a process are these:

    * it comes up automatically on server startup
    * it logs errors and information to a named location, which is configurable
    * if the process dies, it restarts itself straight away 

[...]

Run the command as normal, but pass one of --start, --stop or --restart to 
work as a daemon. Otherwise, the command will run as a standard application.

The below script should work provided that the layout of your project (and the path to your settings file) looks like this:

/var/www/cloudloon/horizon/openstack_dashboard/settings.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os, sys

sys.path.append("/var/www/cloudloon/horizon")
os.environ["DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE"] = "openstack_dashboard.settings"
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

I believe the problem you're seeing is due to the arrangement of your project, or that you need to append another directory level to the sys.path call in the script.

Edit:

Looking at your github project, horizon and openstack_dashboard are on the same directory level. What you'd want to do is set your sys.path to one level higher:

sys.path.append("/var/www/cloudloon")

This worked for me:

from django.conf import settings
import myfolder.settings as app_settings

settings.configure(INSTALLED_APPS=app_settings.INSTALLED_APPS,DATABASES=app_settings.DATABASES)

import django
django.setup()

from myapp123.models import Sample
for s in Sample.objects.all():
    print(s)

My solution (inspired by http://blog.gabrielsaldana.org/using-django-models-in-external-python-scripts/):

import os
import sys
sys.path.append( os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'MyDjangoProject'))
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "MyDjangoProject.settings")
import django
from django.conf import settings
django.setup()

from myapp.models import MyModel
for s in MyModel.objects.all():
    print(s)