Question

I’m reading a tutorial on how to build a web application with Django. So far, I have installed Django and it seems to work find.

The tutorial asked to create project folders by typing (in Windows command prompt):

django-admin.py startproject django_bookmarks

The folders and files were created successfully. See below:

django_bookmarks/
__init__.py
manage.py
settings.py
urls.py

Then it says we can work with SQLite3 for now (later when we deploy we will need larger
database engine such as MySQL.
Then I had to setup the database in engine by running settings.py.
and make sure codes are written as follow:

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = 'bookmarksdb'
DATABASE_USER = ''
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''
DATABASE_HOST = ''
DATABASE_PORT = ''

I made the changes above.
Here comes the bad stuff. I need to create database tables that the application will run
with by typing (in Windows command prompt):

python manage.py syncdb

then I get an error message saying the following:

"load_backend raise ImproperlyConfigured(error_msg)
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured:'sqlite3 isn't an available database
backend.
Try using django.db.backends.sqlite3 instead.
Error was: No module named base"

Now, how can I setup those needed sqlite3 database tables?
Any help will do, thanks!

Answer 1

The database engine needs to be set to django.db.backends.sqlite3

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'django.db.backends.sqlite3'
DATABASE_NAME = 'bookmarksdb'
DATABASE_USER = ''
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''
DATABASE_HOST = ''
DATABASE_PORT = ''

More recent versions of Django (post 1.3) require this to be fully specified. If you’re following a book or guide it may refer to an older Django version.