ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty —09 June 2013

I hit by a strange issue with Django. If I try to use a local configuration with

./manage.py shell --settings=myproject.local_settings

I got the error:

ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty

Strange because SECRET_KEY is certainly set. No stack trace, just a single line of error.

The cause turned out to be that in the main settings.py file I imported a method from one of my apps like this:

from accounts.views import render_failure
OPENID_RENDER_FAILURE = render_failure

I don’t understand why exactly this is a problem, but removing the import solved the issue. On the other hand, I needed that import as the OPENID_RENDER_FAILURE setting of the django-openid-auth package takes a callable, giving it the absolute function name accounts.views.render_failure as a string doesn’t cut it. I worked around that like this:

def render_failure(*args, **kwargs):
    from accounts.views import render_failure
    return render_failure(*args, **kwargs)
OPENID_RENDER_FAILURE = render_failure

Now everything works fine.