Reading env settings from file using environ leads to crash to some applications like sphinx, django extensions

What happened?

First of all, I am not sure whether this ticket should be a bug report or an enhancement. Either case, whenever you want to generate docs using sphinx, sphinx should be able run the application. Therefore, for any django project the docs/conf.py should contains the following additional code:

# If extensions (or modules to document with autodoc) are in another directory,
# add these directories to sys.path here. If the directory is relative to the
# documentation root, use os.path.abspath to make it absolute, like shown here.
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('../'))
import django
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", path_to_settings)
django.setup()

Using Cookiecutter template, the variable path_to_settings should be "config.settings.local". However, by running make html this will generate error because function env() won’t be able to work and will raise the following error:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable

To fix, you can replace every instance of env(..) to the correct value for example: CELERY_BROKER_URL = env('CELERY_BROKER_URL') should be replaced with CELERY_BROKER_URL = "redis://redis:6379/0"

Therefore, I have created a new settings script just for documentation and it only contains the minimal settings to make django application run. I called the settings settings_docs.py and within \docs\conf.py, the
django settings module will be os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", config.settings.settings_docs)

Steps to reproduce

• generate .rst files from your apps.
• within \doc\ directory run make html

[uzi0espil]

@Micromegass Glad I was able to help! Cheers.

[Micromegass]

Mate, I it worked. ssh’d into docker and turns out make wasn’t installed. I added apk add make to my dockerfile, ran the command again and it worked. Thanks a bunch!!