Suddenly I'm Getting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE Is Not Defined When Using Runserver

The full error is: ImportError: Could not import settings 'app.settings' (Is it on sys.path?): No module named settings The whole time, python manage.py runserver had been worki

Solution 1:

Adding toplevel imports of internal django functions can break django in really non-obvious ways.

from django.core import context_processors

was in a file that was imported into settings.py pretty early, which caused this error.

In my opinion, django could use a better way to detect this type of problem. The line which caused the problem didn't show up in the traceback at all.