Locating Django Applications in Their Own Sub-Directory

Posted by Paul on 17th February 2014

It’s straightforward to keep Django applications in their own directory if necessary – though the convention is to place them in the project’s root directory.

Instructions below assume pwd/$PWD is the project’s root directory.

Create the directory in which Django applications will be located:

$ mkdir apps

Create a new application named _newapp_ under apps/newapp using startapp‘s optional directory parameter (this requires that the target directory exist, so create it first):

$ mkdir apps/newapp
 $ ./manage.py startapp newapp apps/newapp

Modify the project’s manage.py file to ensure the development server can find the applications. It should end up looking something like the following:

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

if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")

    # Add the apps directoriy to Python's path. In production it will
    # be necessary to add the apps directory to the path, too.
    from os.path import abspath, dirname, join
    PROJECT_ROOT = abspath(dirname(__file__))
    sys.path.append(join(PROJECT_ROOT, "apps"))

    from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line

    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)

For a development environment, that’s it. For production, ensure the apps directory is included on the project’s PYTHONPATH. If using Apache and mod_wsgi then ensure that the WSGIDaemonProcess directive in the project’s <virtualhost/> includes the path to the newly added apps directory, as well as the path to the (virtualenv’s) python site packages directory and the project’s root directory:

WSGIDaemonProcess myapp python-path=/myapp/apps:/myapp/python-packages:/myapp

Tags: Django