VS 2019 django The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty

Question

VS 2019 django The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty

Rick 6

How can I set the SECRET_KEY in a django project? I have created a new django project from existing code and in my settings.py file I have SECRET_KEY = '4blyti@u4yj$skr7e&g63f*l%#jl(xq&od-2y&qzo^rrs!_p#7'. When I try to make migrations I get django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty. I also have os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "tutorial.settings.prod") in my wsgi.py file.

Tianyu Sun-MSFT 34,441 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2021-01-01T03:56:25.457+00:00

Hi @Rick , did you perform some operations such as changing SECRET_KEY, modifying other settings? I suggest you delete the hidden .vs folder and other cache files then close Visual Studio and relaunch it > rerun the project to see if this error remains. Besides, did the existing code work well before(maybe)? If possible, please also create another new django project and try again.
Rick 6 Reputation points

2021-01-01T19:45:12.533+00:00

TianyuSun,
Thanks for the reply. I did try deleting the .vs folder and restarting VS2019 but I get the same thing. This is a tutorial project that I downloaded from GIT https://github.com/maxg203/Django-Tutorials.git. I have ran this on Linux before and it did work but I'm trying to switch to Visual Studio. I also tried to open a powershell and checked the env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and Env:SECRET_KEY. The Env:SECRET_KEY was correctly set but the env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE was not. I set that in PS and then from PS ran django-admin runserver then I get ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tutorial'. That is coming from the env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE setting and I've tried to change that a couple of times to see if changing the path would fix it. I used the command $Env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='tutorial.settings.dev' to set the module path but it seems it is not able to find the tutorial.settings.dev file.

2 answers

Your answer

Tianyu Sun-MSFT 34,441 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2021-01-01T03:56:25.457+00:00

Hi @Rick , did you perform some operations such as changing SECRET_KEY, modifying other settings? I suggest you delete the hidden .vs folder and other cache files then close Visual Studio and relaunch it > rerun the project to see if this error remains. Besides, did the existing code work well before(maybe)? If possible, please also create another new django project and try again.
Rick 6 Reputation points

2021-01-01T19:45:12.533+00:00

TianyuSun,
Thanks for the reply. I did try deleting the .vs folder and restarting VS2019 but I get the same thing. This is a tutorial project that I downloaded from GIT https://github.com/maxg203/Django-Tutorials.git. I have ran this on Linux before and it did work but I'm trying to switch to Visual Studio. I also tried to open a powershell and checked the env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and Env:SECRET_KEY. The Env:SECRET_KEY was correctly set but the env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE was not. I set that in PS and then from PS ran django-admin runserver then I get ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tutorial'. That is coming from the env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE setting and I've tried to change that a couple of times to see if changing the path would fix it. I used the command $Env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='tutorial.settings.dev' to set the module path but it seems it is not able to find the tutorial.settings.dev file.

Answer 1

TianyuSun,
I did try manually setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and SECRET_KEY manually as noted above but it still had the same error. I have solved the issue by stepping into the code in debug I found that the init.py file was executing then it was exiting the program without going to the settings.py file. So in the init.py file I added
from .base import *

env_name = os.getenv('ENV_NAME', 'local')

if env_name == 'prod':
from .prod import *
elif env_name == 'dev':
from .dev import *
else:
from .local import *

This did resolve the issue.

Answer 2

Hi @Rick ,

Thank you for your feedback.

Looks like the issue is caused by this tutorial project(some settings…), if you try to run following command in the terminal will this issue disappear?

set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=tutorial.settings.dev
set SECRET_KEY='*'

(remember to replace the * with your secret key in the settings.py file)

If this issue still persists, I suggest you can directly ask author for this issue and check the related issues reported in GitHub > Issues of this Django tutorial.

Sincerely,
Tianyu

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VS 2019 django The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty

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