Troubleshooting¶

This page contains some advice about errors and problems commonly encountered during the development of Django applications.

Problems running django-admin.py¶

“command not found: django-admin.py”¶

django-admin.py should be on your system path if you installed Django via python setup.py. If it’s not on your path, you can find it in site-packages/django/bin, where site-packages is a directory within your Python installation. Consider symlinking to django-admin.py from some place on your path, such as /usr/local/bin.

Script name may differ in distribution packages¶

If you installed Django using a Linux distribution’s package manager (e.g. apt-get or yum) django-admin.py may have been renamed to django-admin; use that instead.

Mac OS X permissions¶

If you’re using Mac OS X, you may see the message “permission denied” when you try to run django-admin.py. This is because, on Unix-based systems like OS X, a file must be marked as “executable” before it can be run as a program. To do this, open Terminal.app and navigate (using the cd command) to the directory where django-admin.py is installed, then run the command sudo chmod +x django-admin.py.

Running virtualenv on Windows¶

If you used virtualenv to install Django on Windows, you may get an ImportError when you try to run django-admin.py. This is because Windows does not run the Python interpreter from your virtual environment unless you invoke it directly. Instead, prefix all commands that use .py files with python and use the full path to the file, like so: python C:\pythonXY\Scripts\django-admin.py.