Custom commands cannot be run from cron (or other directory) if project is not on Python Path

[mark.ellul@…]

If I wanted to create a custom command say in myproj.weather application a custom command to get_latest_weather and wanted to run that in a cron job it would fail if myproj is not on the PYTHON PATH.

I am using Python 2.6 and the imp.find_module is not finding the project path.

I can see the project module does indeed exist in sys.modules

[Mark <mark.ellul@…>]

When I insert the code below at line 56 (in the ImportError exception handling) in init.py at django/core/management/ it resolves the issue

if sys.modules.has_key(part):
   path = os.path.realpath(sys.modules[part].__path__[0])
elif os.path.basename(os.getcwd()) != part:
   raise e   

Hope that helps.

[Mark <mark.ellul@…>]

HI,

Maybe I was not being specific enough...

If you create a custom command in an app in your project myproj/myapp1/management/commands/my_custom_command.py and then try to use the call_command from the django.core.management

i.e.

from django.core.management import call_command
call_command('my_custom_command')

and your project is not on the PYTHONPATH, you will get a failure, because imp.find_module is not finding the myproj module that is loaded in memory.

If you add the fragment I have already mentioned it will search the sys.modules dictionary, where it does find the project's loaded module.

Please let me know if you need more details.

Regards

Mark

[Mark <mark.ellul@…>]

patch for this fix

[Russell Keith-Magee]

This isn't a blocker for v1.1.

[mark.ellul@…]

I agree not a blocker, Sorry I didn't understand the milestone setting properly!

Its a weird edge case bug, easily fixed though

[Łukasz Rekucki]

Looks good, although getting rid of the terrible hack on PYTHON_PATH would be even better.

[Aymeric Augustin]

I'm struggling to understand what this change actually does :/

[Luke Plant]

AFAICS, the bug can happen only when you are using the old sys.path hack that we used to use, in which a module in your project could be importable as 'myproj.myapp.mymodule' and 'myapp.mymodule'. I'm marking FIXED on that basis, since we've removed/deprecated the sys.path hack - ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/releases/1.4/#django-core-management-setup-environ