docs: added section regarding setting up django's settings.

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Rolando Espinoza 2013-09-30 09:47:07 -04:00
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@ -100,3 +100,47 @@ models, but bear in mind that Django ORM may not scale well if you scrape a lot
of items (ie. millions) with Scrapy. This is because a relational backend is
often not a good choice for a write intensive application (such as a web
crawler), specially if the database is highly normalized and with many indices.
Django settings set up
======================
To use the Django models outside the Django application you need to set up the
``DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE`` environment variable and --in most cases-- modify
the ``PYTHONPATH`` environment variable to be able to import the settings
module.
There are many ways to do this depending on your use case and preferences.
Below is detailed one of the simplest ways to do it.
Suppose your Django project is named ``mysite``, is located in the path
``/home/projects/mysite`` and you have created an app ``myapp`` with the model
``Person``. That means your directory structure is something like this::
/home/projects/mysite
├── manage.py
├── myapp
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── tests.py
│   └── views.py
└── mysite
├── __init__.py
├── settings.py
├── urls.py
└── wsgi.py
Then you need to add ``/home/projects/mysite`` to the ``PYTHONPATH``
environment variable and set up the environment variable
``DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE`` to ``mysite.settings``. That can be done in your
Scrapy's settings file by adding the lines below::
import sys
sys.path.append('/home/projects/mysite')
import os
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'mysite.settings'
Notice that we modify the ``sys.path`` variable instead the ``PYTHONPATH``
environment variable as we are already within the python runtime. If everything
is right, you should be able to start the ``scrapy shell`` command and import
the model ``Person`` (i.e. ``from myapp.models import Person``).