Django model “doesn't declare an explicit app_label”

Question

I\'m at wit\'s end. After a dozen hours of troubleshooting, probably more, I thought I was finally in business, but then I got:

Model class django.contrib.co         


        

Answer 1

I had this error today trying to run Django tests because I was using the shorthand from .models import * syntax in one of my files. The issue was that I had a file structure like so:

    apps/
      myapp/
        models/
          __init__.py
          foo.py
          bar.py

and in models/__init__.py I was importing my models using the shorthand syntax:

    from .foo import *
    from .bar import *

In my application I was importing models like so:

    from myapp.models import Foo, Bar

This caused the Django model doesn't declare an explicit app_label when running ./manage.py test.

To fix the problem, I had to explicitly import from the full path in models/__init__.py:

    from myapp.models.foo import *
    from myapp.models.bar import *

That took care of the error.

H/t https://medium.com/@michal.bock/fix-weird-exceptions-when-running-django-tests-f58def71b59a