Setting up Eclipse for Python and Django

After spending more hours than I would like to admit, I finally have Eclipse installed, with the Pydev plugin and I have debugging working for django. It was that last part that caused all the misery.

These notes are small additions to the excellent online tutorial by Nick Vlku. You will want to watch that first. I strongly recommend watching the whole thing once without pause. If you try to do things as he does them you will encounter errors - ones that he will give the solution to a little further into the screencast.

Here is my setup:

Windows XP

Django 1.1.1

Python 2.5

Eclipse 3.5.2

PyDev 1.5.5

This version of Pydev includes the extensions. Although the menus might be in different locations, it's not hard to guess what the new locations are. Enter the same values, etc... as Nick does.

After I got eclipse and pydev installed, I played around with it for a while with an ordinary python app (e.g non-django). I got used to the auto complete and debugging. Being familiar with these things definitely made it easier to setup debugging for django.

Here are some tips for setting up eclipse to work with the django development server. The goal is to have the development server work the same way it does outside of eclipse, but with breakpoints.

The first tip is to watch the windows process monitor for python.exe processes. It is very easy to end up with some orphaned processes which can cause things to stop working right. When in doubt, restart eclipse. After you start eclipse, you should see one python.exe process. Starting the remote debug server does not instantly start another python process. Running your code in debug mode adds two processes.

Next, Nick gives some code for your manage.py module. I could not get things to work using that code. I do not know if the problem was the code or something else. I eventually got things working using this code.

Next, make sure to start the Debug Server before you run your django code. When you run your django code in debug mode, you will see a message "pydev debugger: starting" - this is not the Debug Server. If you do everything right, you see three python.exe processes.

Here is what my debug window looks like when everything is working and the code is stopped at a breakpoint at the function homepage in the views.py module:

I have not figured out how to stop the debug server - outside of killing it from the process monitor. If you read the comments on Nick's post, you will see that others are wondering the same thing.

As for other setup tips, an other blogger recommended setting the environment variables DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and PYTHONPATH in the Python Run configuration. I found that made things worse. If you do not know what I am talking about, then don't worry about it.

Others have suggested adding the --noreload flag after the "runserver" command in the Run Python configuration. Evidently setting that flag causes eclipse to print more informative messages in the console (like the django development server run outside of eclipse) with the downside being that you must stop and start the server if you change any of your code. For me the most important thing to know was that django debugging can work with or without that flag.