Can one use the Django database layer outside of Django?

I’ve got a nice database I’ve created in Django, and I’d like to interface with it through some python scripts outside of my website stuff. I’m curious if it’s possible to use the Django database API outside of a Django site, and if so does anyone have any info on how it can be done? Google hasn’t yielded many useful results for this.

Answer

You just need to configure the Django settings before you do any calls, including importing your models. Something like this:

from django.conf import settings
settings.configure(
    DATABASE_ENGINE = 'postgresql_psycopg2',
    DATABASE_NAME = 'db_name',
    DATABASE_USER = 'db_user',
    DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'db_pass',
    DATABASE_HOST = 'localhost',
    DATABASE_PORT = '5432',
    TIME_ZONE = 'America/New_York',
)

Again, be sure to run that code before running, e.g.:

from your_app.models import *

Then just use the DB API as usual.