[FIXED] RuntimeError: Model class django.contrib.sites.models.Site doesn't declare an explicit app_label and isn't in an application in INSTALLED_APPS

Issue

I am building an application with Django Rest Framework and AngularJs. I am using Django-rest-auth for my authentication purposes, although, I have not been able to set it up. Anyway, I am trying to set up this app with my project. I realized I need to install django-rest-auth-registration to get it running, so I followed this documentation to do the following things:

I ran the commands

pip install django-rest-auth

and

pip install django-allauth

Any my settings.py looks like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    # 3rd party apps
    'rest_framework',
    'rest_framework.authtoken',
    'rest_auth',
    'allauth',
    'allauth.account',
    'rest_auth.registration',

    # My app
    'myapp',
]

I have also added the authentication backends, context_processors, and the proper urls.

However, when I try to migrate, my terminal throws the following 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.

Why do I get this error, and how do I solve it to migrate my project? Thanks!

Solution

The fix

Just add Django's Sites framework to your apps and set SITE_ID to 1 in your settings. List it prior to dependent libraries in the INSTALLED_APPS setting.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.sites',
    ...
]

SITE_ID = 1

Why does this happen?

Django's Sites Framework is a contributed module bundled with the core library that allows for the use of a single Django application/codebase with different sites (that can use different databases, logic in views, etc). The SITE_ID setting, as stated in the docs, "is used so that application data can hook into specific sites and a single database can manage content for multiple sites."

In this particular case AllAuth requires the Sites Framework in order to function properly. Many other third-party libraries are built to safely handle cases where multiple sites may be present and as such may be best .

Answered By - Ian Price