Django management task won't work on CentOS in crontab or outside project directory
Question: On my local machine (Mac OSX 10.6) I wrote a django custom admin command which
works great. I can use it both within and outside my project directory just
fine. For some reason on my CentOS 5.6 server, it won't work from outside the
project directory. This is really annoying since using this custom admin
command in a cron job requires it to run from the home directory.

in short:

When I run "python ./manage.py scrape" or "python manage.py scrape",
everything is fine.

When I run "python /home/[username]/webapps/myproject/manage.py scrape" or
"python myproject/manage.py scrape", I get the following error:

> unknown command: 'scrape'
>
> Type 'manage.py help' for usage.

On CentOS, when I run manage.py help inside the project directory, scrape
shows up as a command; but if I run it outside the project directory, scrape
does not appear as a valid command. On OS-X scrape appears as a valid command
regardless of where I run manage.py help from.

Any idea how I can fix this?


Answer: I know CentOS ships with Python 2.4, so is your code running on 2.4 or are you
using a contained environment, this is usually fixed by adding your PYTHONPATH
correctly

    
    
    import sys
    print sys.path
    

verify such for starters

