Django tutorial part 2 - app does not show up on admin after registering

Question

Following the Django tutorial (part 2), I can't seem to see my Polls app in my django admin panel after registering it. My screen looks a bit like this, with a distinct lack of a section for the Polls app:

What I've done so far (following parts of this answer and the tutorial itself):

Registered my app in the admin.py file.
Added it to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py in my project folder.
Ran python manage.py makemigrations & python manage.py migrate without any changes (btw, for future readers - that's the new >1.8 incarnation of syncdb, I believe).
Made sure the user I'm signing in with has superuser priviliges (as per this answer).
Restarted my nginx.

I'm still hazy as to what the problem is or, for that matter, how to debug it.

My admin.py file:

from django.contrib import admin

from .models import Question

admin.site.register(Question)

My models.py file (notice the Question object):

import datetime

from django.utils import timezone
from django.db import models

class Question(models.Model):
    question_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')

    def __str__(self):
        return self.question_text

    def was_published_recently(self):
        return self.pub_date >= timezone.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=1)


class Choice(models.Model):
    question = models.ForeignKey(Question, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    choice_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    votes = models.IntegerField(default=0)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.choice_text

INSTALLED_APPS portion of my settings.py project file:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'polls.apps.PollsConfig',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
]

Do you see an `admin.pyc` file in the directory? I'm guessing `admin.py` is not getting executed. Also make sure `django.contrib.admin` is in your `INSTALLED_APPS` too. — themanatuf, Feb 22 '17 at 19:51
Have you added your app to the list of installed_apps in settings.py? — Manikanta Prasanth, Feb 22 '17 at 19:53
I have indeed. Also posted it here @ManikantaPrasanth. @themanatuf there're no `.pyc` files in the folder, but the `__pycahce__` folder has one: `admin.cpython-35.pyc`. Might that one cause the problem? — Tom Granot, Feb 22 '17 at 19:56
Have indeed, both stated no changes were required. Adding it to question now. — Tom Granot, Feb 22 '17 at 19:57
How do you run Django? Did you restart that server as well? You shouldn't have to restart nginx, but you do need to restart your WSGI server for code changes to take effect. — knbk, Feb 22 '17 at 21:38
Gunicorn. Just restarted it and it crashed nginx :) Better than before though, at least now something is breaking. What could be the cause of that? — Tom Granot, Feb 22 '17 at 21:41

Tom Granot · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-12T11:14:11.393

As it turns out, I wasn't paying attention to the process in which the application was served.

So, riding on this answer, I figured out it breaks down like this:

nginx gets a URL, decides where to pull from - in our case, Gunicorn.
Gunicorn searches for the proper Python file to pull - in our case, Django.
Djnago gets executed and the app loads (including our admin panel).

In this case, after making the changes to the admin panel I've restarted nginx, but not Gunicorn. Restarting Gunicorn solved the problem, and if you looked at my last comment - nginx crashed because of a typo in my admin.py file (added well after writing this question, during my attempt to fix it, and thus does not appear in the OP).

Django tutorial part 2 - app does not show up on admin after registering

1 Answers1