Django Setup for use in Jupyter Notebooks

Django for Jupyter.md

Django for Jupyter

It's true packages exist to make it "easy" to use Django inside of a jupyter notebook. I seem to always run into issues successfully running these packages. I've found the below method useful although I cannot recall how I discovered how this works (aka attribution needed).

Requirements

• Virtual Environment (virtualenv, venv, pipenv, etc)
• Django installed & project created (we'll use the project name cfehome)
• Jupyter installed at least in the virtual environment

Setup:

It's simple. Just copy django_for_jupyter.py next to your Jupyter notebook files (.ipynb).

init_django Via Project Name

First cell

from django_for_jupyter import init_django
init_django("cfehome")

Change cfehome to your Django project name.

init_django Using Environment Variables

In, .env:

DJANGO_PROJECT="cfehome"

Or on the CLI:

DJANGO_PROJECT="cfehome" jupyter notebook

First cell

from django_for_jupyter import init_django
init_django()

Change cfehome to your Django project name.

Using Django Models

Now that you've run init_django with no errors. You can import Django models:

Second Cell

from myapp.models import MyModel

MyModel.objects.all()

Simple enough right?

django_for_jupyter.py

import os, sys
PWD = os.getenv('PWD')

PROJ_MISSING_MSG = """Set an enviroment variable:\n
`DJANGO_PROJECT=your_project_name`\n
or call:\n
`init_django(your_project_name)`
"""

def init_django(project_name=None):
    os.chdir(PWD)
    project_name = project_name or os.environ.get('DJANGO_PROJECT') or None
    if project_name == None:
        raise Exception(PROJ_MISSING_MSG)
    sys.path.insert(0, os.getenv('PWD'))
    os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', f'{project_name}.settings')
    os.environ["DJANGO_ALLOW_ASYNC_UNSAFE"] = "true"
    import django
    django.setup()

Very cool and much appreciated!

I had issues getting this to work on my windows work pc. Not sure of the exact cause but I was having issues getting the correct directory with os.getenv('PWD').

Instead of:
PWD = os.getenv("PWD")
I had to use:
PWD = os.path.dirname(os.getcwd())

and then instead of os.getenv('PWD') on line 15, I used my new PWD variable:
sys.path.insert(0, PWD)

Same for me!

Very useful! Thank you. Works perfectly with jupyter-lab and xeus-python so having debugger directly in the browser.