Django 1.5b1: executing django-admin.py causes "No module named settings" error

I had the same issue when starting a new project.I solved the problem by giving this command at the command prompt:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=

in this way I unset the variable that was pointing to a "settings" file (discovered using env | grep DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE) I set before starting using virtualenv

after unsetting the variable the django-admin.py script worked like a charm!

I've had the same issue as you, and I haven't come up with a good fix aside from prepending my project folder to the PYTHONPATH like this:

export PYTHONPATH="/absolute/path/to/django/project/folder:$PYTHONPATH"

where my <project> is located at /absolute/path/to/django/project/folder/<project>. I add that export command to the end of my env/bin/activate script so it happens every time I initialize the virtualenv.

The only difference between our two situations is that I use multiple settings files instead of a single settings.py module.

You can also call django-admin.py from the folder containing your Django project like so:

python ~/.virtualenvs/devel/bin/django-admin.py <command>

so that it recognizes your current working directory as part of the path.

Hope that makes sense. It's kind of clumsy to explain which makes it hard to search for an answer.

Maybe your problem is related to this:Wrong python path in script header

If you want to do anything except creating a new django project inside your venv, you should call python manage.py (of course, whereis python should return your venv executable)