“startproject” option disappeared from django-admin.py

Question

I apologize in advance for my noobness. I tried to create a new project with "django-admin.py startproject blah" and I got an error saying "startproject" is an unknown option for django-admin.py. This can't be normal. I then did "django-admin.py help" and viewed the possible arguments, and they were the same as the arguments for manage.py (startapp, sqlall, sqlflush). What on earth is going on?

Answer 1

If you are already in a project, startproject is explicitly removed from manage.py and django-admin.py. From the docstring to django.core.management.get_commands:

If a settings module has been specified, user-defined commands will also be included, the startproject command will be disabled, and the startapp command will be modified to use the directory in which the settings module appears.

Answer 2

From the Django Documentation:

[startproject] is disabled [...] when the environment
variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE has been set. To
re-enable it in these situations, [...] unset
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE.

I ran across this just the other day and it caused me some amount of groaning when I finally figured it out.