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Troubleshooting: Common issues

Deploy using up very large harddrive space

By default, a docker deploy copies most files from the folder the project is run from to each docker container. However, this can lead to very large container images if, for example, a recent database backup has been saved locally. To mitigate this, the .dockerignore file provided currently excludes file paths that match these patterns (as of 4 May 2023, see ticket #90 for the latest on this issue):

fixtures/*
backups*
*.tar
*.sql.gz

It also has a line for a file to include (see the .dockerfile docs for syntax):

!fixture-files/*

If you’ve added another very large file that may have ended up taking up a lot of space on your deploys (and potentially a very long deploy time) adding a lines to avoid those files in .dockerignore may help. For that to take effect, you may need to do a fresh build without the cache.

docker compose -f local.yml build --no-cache


sudo docker compose -f local.yml build --no-cache
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Error: ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting INSTALLED_APPS, but settings are not configured.

Problem: I have received an error that looks like this:

ImproperlyConfigured                                       Traceback (most recent call last) … ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting INSTALLED_APPS, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

Explanation: You have likely attempted to import any of the models (Newspaper, Item, Entry, etc.) and forgotten about the import django_initialiser statement that is required to set up Django in a Jupyter Notebook.

Solution: You must run import django_initialiser before you attempt to import any models from the Django package.

If it does not work: Are you running the notebook in the same folder as the manage.py script? Otherwise, try to move the notebook to that folder.

NameError: name 'Newspaper' is not defined

Problem: I have received an error that looks like this:

NameError                                       Traceback (most recent call last) … NameError: name ‘Newspaper’ is not defined

Explanation: You have likely forgotten to import the correct model before you tried to run a query on one of the newspapers (or whichever model you’re trying to access).

Solution: Run from newspapers.models import Newspaper or follow the same pattern for whichever model you want to import. (See the database schema if you are unsure which model you want to access.)

If it does not work: Are you running the notebook in the same folder as the manage.py script? Otherwise, try to move the notebook to that folder.