Django-admin.py startproject > Unknown Command Posted on December 28, 2008 by Dave Fowler

This is hardly worth a post but I'd found nothing on google for the fix and so I'm documenting it here for others. In Django v 1.0 django-admin.py has smartly been altered to behave the same as ./manage.py. It seems that this has effected the startproject command in the event that your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable is already set. If it is you'll get something like this:

$ django-admin.py startproject myproject Unknown command: 'startproject' Type 'django-admin.py help' for usage.

There's an easy fix. Just blank out your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE variable and startproject will then be recognized.

$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=""

$ django-admin.py startproject myproject