I'm working on a Django 1.5 project and I have a custom user model (let's call it `CustomUser`). Another app (SomeApp) needs to reference this custom user model. For the purposes of ForeignKey and such, the Django documentation says to use

```
User = settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL 

```

However, some functions in SomeApp.models need to access what would have formerly been known as `User.objects`. But User is now a string and not a class, so `User.objects` fails. The alternative would be

```
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
User = get_user_model()

```

Which works in other modules, but when I use this in models.py of SomeApp, Django raises an error:

> 
> ImproperlyConfigured("AUTH\_USER\_MODEL refers to model '%s' that has not been installed" % settings.AUTH\_USER\_MODEL)
> 
> 
> 

Any ideas?

EDIT 1 - Traceback:

```
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "...\django-badger\badger\__init__.py", line 7, in <module>
    from badger.models import Badge, Award, Progress
  File "...\django-badger\badger\models.py", line 26, in <module>
    User = get_user_model()
  File "...\lib\site-packages\django\contrib\auth\__init__.py", line 127, in get_user_model
    raise ImproperlyConfigured("AUTH_USER_MODEL refers to model '%s' that has not been installed" % settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)
ImproperlyConfigured: AUTH_USER_MODEL refers to model 'MyApp.AuthUser' that has not been installed

```

EDIT 2 - INSTALLED\_APPS settings:

```
INSTALLED_APPS = (
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.sites',
'django.contrib.messages',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
'django.contrib.admin',
'django.contrib.admindocs',
'south',
'MyApp',   # this is where my user model is defined
'SomeApp', # I try to use get_user_model() in this app's models.py; doesn't work.
'social_auth',
)

```