Debugging Setting up a Django Project
Normally when I start a new Django project I’ll use the PyCharm setup wizard, but recently I wanted to try out VS Code for a Django project and was super stumped when I would get a message like this:
ERROR:root:code for hash md5 was not found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 147, in <module>
globals()[__func_name] = __get_hash(__func_name)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 97, in __get_builtin_constructor
raise ValueError('unsupported hash type ' + name)
ValueError: unsupported hash type md5
ERROR:root:code for hash sha1 was not found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 147, in <module>
globals()[__func_name] = __get_hash(__func_name)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 97, in __get_builtin_constructor
raise ValueError('unsupported hash type ' + name)
ValueError: unsupported hash type sha1
ERROR:root:code for hash sha224 was not found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 147, in <module>
globals()[__func_name] = __get_hash(__func_name)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 97, in __get_builtin_constructor
raise ValueError('unsupported hash type ' + name)
ValueError: unsupported hash type sha224
ERROR:root:code for hash sha256 was not found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 147, in <module>
globals()[__func_name] = __get_hash(__func_name)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 97, in __get_builtin_constructor
raise ValueError('unsupported hash type ' + name)
ValueError: unsupported hash type sha256
ERROR:root:code for hash sha384 was not found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 147, in <module>
globals()[__func_name] = __get_hash(__func_name)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 97, in __get_builtin_constructor
raise ValueError('unsupported hash type ' + name)
ValueError: unsupported hash type sha384
ERROR:root:code for hash sha512 was not found.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 147, in <module>
globals()[__func_name] = __get_hash(__func_name)
File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/hashlib.py", line 97, in __get_builtin_constructor
raise ValueError('unsupported hash type ' + name)
ValueError: unsupported hash type sha512
Here are the steps I was using to get started
From a directory I wanted to create the project I would set up my virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv
And then activate it
source venv/bin/activate
Next, I would install Django
pip install django
Next, using the startproject command per the docs I would
django-admin startproject my_great_project .
And get the error message above 🤦🏻♂️
The strangest part about the error message is that it references Python2.7 everywhere … which is odd because I’m in a Python3 virtual environment.
I did a pip list and got:
Package Version
---------- -------
asgiref 3.3.4
Django 3.2.4
pip 21.1.2
pytz 2021.1
setuptools 49.2.1
sqlparse 0.4.1
OK … so everything is in my virtual environment. Let’s drop into the REPL and see what’s going on
Well, that looks to be OK.
Next, I checked the contents of my directory using tree -L 2
├── manage.py
├── my_great_project
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── settings.py
│ ├── urls.py
│ └── wsgi.py
└── venv
├── bin
├── include
├── lib
└── pyvenv.cfg
Yep … that looks good too.
OK, let’s go look at the installed packages for Python 2.7 then. On macOS they’re installed at
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Looking in there and I see that Django is installed.
OK, let’s use pip to uninstall Django from Python2.7, except that pip gives essentially the same result as running the django-admin command.
OK, let’s just remove it manually. After a bit of googling I found this Stackoverflow answer on how to remove the offending package (which is what I assumed would be the answer, but better to check, right?)
After removing the Django install from Python 2.7 and running django-admin --version I get
So I googled that error message and found another answers on Stackoverflow which lead me to look at the manage.py file. When I cat the file I get:
# manage.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
...
That first line SHOULD be finding the Python executable in my virtual environment, but it’s not.
Next I googled the error message django-admin code for hash sha384 was not found
Which lead to this Stackoverflow answer. I checked to see if Python2 was installed with brew using
brew leaves | grep python
which returned python@2
Based on the answer above, the solution was to uninstall the Python2 that was installed by brew. Now, although Python2 has retired, I was leery of uninstalling it on my system without first verifying that I could remove the brew version without impacting the system version which is needed by macOS.
Using brew info python@2 I determined where brew installed Python2 and compared it to where Python2 is installed by macOS and they are indeed different
Output of brew info python@2
...
/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1 (7,515 files, 122.4MB) *
Built from source on 2018-08-05 at 15:18:23
...
Output of which python
/usr/bin/python
OK, now we can remove the version of Python2 installed by brew
brew uninstall python@2
Now with all of that cleaned up, lets try again. From a clean project directory:
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install django
django-admin --version
The last command returned
zsh: /usr/local/bin/django-admin: bad interpreter: /usr/local/opt/python@2/bin/python2.7: no such file or directory
3.2.4
OK, I can get the version number and it mostly works, but can I create a new project?
django-admin startproject my_great_project .
Which returns
zsh: /usr/local/bin/django-admin: bad interpreter: /usr/local/opt/python@2/bin/python2.7: no such file or directory
BUT, the project was installed
├── db.sqlite3
├── manage.py
├── my_great_project
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── __pycache__
│ ├── asgi.py
│ ├── settings.py
│ ├── urls.py
│ └── wsgi.py
└── venv
├── bin
├── include
├── lib
└── pyvenv.cfg
And I was able to run it
python manage.py runserver
Success! I’ve still got that last bug to deal with, but that’s a story for a different day!
Short Note
My initial fix, and my initial draft for this article, was to use the old adage, turn it off and turn it back on. In this case, the implementation would be the deactivate and then re activate the virtual environment and that’s what I’d been doing.
As I was writing up this article I was hugely influenced by the work of Julie Evans and kept asking, “but why?”. She’s been writing a lot of awesome, amazing things, and has several zines for purchase that I would highly recommend.
She’s also generated a few debugging ‘games’ that are a lot of fun.
Anyway, thanks Julie for pushing me to figure out the why for this issue.
Post Script
I figured out the error message above and figured, well, I might as well update the post! I thought it had to do with zsh, but no, it was just more of the same.
The issue was that Django had been installed in the base Python2 (which I knew). All I had to do was to uninstall it with pip.
pip uninstall django
The trick was that pip wasn't working out for me ... it was generating errors. So I had to run the command
python -m pip uninstall django
I had to run this AFTER I put the Django folder back into /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages (if you'll recall from above, I removed it from the folder)
After that clean up was done, everything worked out as expected! I just had to keep digging!