Integrating pinax-notifications failed in django app

Question

Im working with django-1.10 and would like to implement some notification behaviour for my application using pinax-notifications-4.0.

I am following the quickstart for including this to the INSTALLED_APP

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "pinax.notifications",
    # ...
]

then and the usage guide.

First is to create the notice type in heat/handler.py

from pinax.notifications.models import NoticeType
from django.conf import settings
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_noop as _

def create_notice_types(sender, **kwargs): 
    NoticeType.create(
        "heat_detection", 
        _("Heat Detected"), 
        _("you have detected a heat record")
    )

Secondly call the handler to create notices after the application is migrated. heat.apps.py

from .handlers import create_notice_types

from django.apps import AppConfig
from django.db.models.signals import post_migrate

class HeatConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'heat'

    def ready(self):
        post_migrate.connect(create_notice_types, sender=self)

finally include the appconfig to the heat.__init__.py

default_app_config = 'heat.apps.HeatConfig'

but when trying to run these:

python manage.py makemigrations pinax.notifications

I got this error: RuntimeError: Model class django.contrib.sites.models.Site doesn't declare an explicit app_label and isn't in an application in INSTALLED_APPS.

Then i try to change the pinax.notifications to pinax-notifications in the INSTALLED_APPS. The server yield me this error: ImportError: No module named pinax-notifications

How to make this work?

Answer 1

I was able to solved it by changing the heat.apps.py file

from django.apps import AppConfig
from django.db.models.signals import post_migrate
from .handlers import create_notice_types

class HeatConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'heat'

    def ready(self):        
        post_migrate.connect(create_notice_types, sender=self)

to this.

from django.apps import AppConfig

class HeatConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'heat'

    def ready(self):
        from django.db.models.signals import post_migrate
        from .handlers import create_notice_types

        post_migrate.connect(create_notice_types, sender=self)

Answer 2

For the record, I also encountered this problem and found, as Roel Delos Reyes previously did, that changing the app-name to pinax (instead of pinax.notifications as the documentation very-clearly states) appears to have solved the problem.

When I made this change, makemigrations found all of the migrations.

I'm actually using both "pinax.notifications" and "pinax.templates" (as the documentation for notifications recommends), and I see that both sets of documentation clearly specify pinax.<something>. I can't explain it ... how could the documentation be that wrong? Twice?

(I'm using Django 1.19 instead of 2.0 for other unrelated reasons, but I don't think that matters.)

Anyhow – "this worked." HTH.™

Important Edit: I subsequently found that both pinax and pinax.notifications are needed in INSTALLED_APPS. Without the latter, migrate would not apply all of the migrations.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
   ...
   'pinax',
   'pinax.notifications', 
   ...
   ]

I also opened (and have since closed) a trouble-ticket to this effect in the project on GitHub, so please refer to that site, as well.