Mastering Django: Core

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE

When you use Django, you have to tell it which settings you're using. Do this by using an environment variable, DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. The value of DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should be in Python path syntax, for example, mysite.settings.

The django-admin utility

When using django-admin, you can either set the environment variable once, or explicitly pass in the settings module each time you run the utility. Example (Unix Bash shell):

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings 
django-admin runserver

Example (Windows shell):

set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings 
django-admin runserver

Use the --settings command-line argument to specify the settings manually:

django-admin runserver --settings=mysite.settings

On the server ...