Comments on: Keep your Django Applications in a Subfolder

By: Olivier

Olivier — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:45:01 +0000

I think it's a good solution, except that I would put that code inside the settings file instead.

I don't understand the comment of James Bennett above. The python search path is designed to be changed, and that it precisely what django does. If django does it, why wouldn't you?

By: Trey

Trey — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:43:16 +0000

@Tarak - That's what I do when I'm installing 3rd party apps. I have something like ~/source/django_apps/ where I keep them and symlink to my site-packages.

By: Tarak Blah

Tarak Blah — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:39:42 +0000

What about putting all symlinks to your django-apps in a directory like

/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/

This might be depending on the unix-distro that's used. This directory was empty on my system. This way I don't have to put the links in the primary system-wide $PYTHONPATH. And with a simple direcory listing I get all activated apps...

I'm using Debian Testing and found this while reading /etc/python2.5/site.py - printing sys.path showed the directory already.

By: Ask Solem Hoel

Ask Solem Hoel — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:05:54 +0000

The mystery is why people didn’t create reusable apps in the first place, so instead of creating the hacks, how about making the non-reusable apps reusable and submit patches/fork them?

By: Eivind Uggedal

Eivind Uggedal — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:34:01 +0000

I love having all my non-reusable apps right in the root of my project dir. I then do

:tabe myapp/views.py

instead of

:tabe apps/myapp/views.py

in vim.

By: Trey

Trey — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:09:51 +0000

The problem I'm trying to solve is just an aesthetic one for the organization of a project with multiple apps.

This is something that kind of bugs me about Django in general--there's not an accepted default, so people just start doing it in different ways. I know apps are just Python modules and can live anywhere in your Python path, but it just seems messy to me to have apps in the same place as templates/ and settings.py and all the other things in the root of your project (at least if there are several apps in the project).

I do appreciate being able to put them outside of the project entirely for reusable apps like django-tagging that will be used on more than one project.

By: bill

bill — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:41:24 +0000

We put all of our apps in a folder called apps/ and have never had to do anything special besides referencing the new folder in import statements. What problem are you trying to solve?

By: James Bennett

James Bennett — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:06:39 +0000

Now to figure out what to do in production…

A Django deployment which has to manually futz with sys.path from Python code just to find its own apps is a Django deployment that shouldn't happen; typically it points to conceptual problems further up the chain (and the fact that you've copy/pasted bits from Brian's code without seeing what you're actually using is a further indicator of such).

The Python path really isn't that tough a thing to master, and once you know how it works, you just put application modules on the Python path. Not in an "apps" folder, not in the bizarre structure Pinax uses (and which I've complained about endlessly to the Pinax folks), just right there on your Python path where you know you can import them without any trouble.

For truly complex situations (and Pinax doesn't even come close to complex enough to need this), use virtualenv to create an isolated environment with its own separate import path you can drop things into.