When creating a project in django using the tutorial at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/intro/tutorial01/, I was getting an import error when running at the command line which asked if I was on the correct sys path using this command?:

django-admin.py startproject mysite.

 ImportError: Could not import settings 'mysite.settings' (Is it on sys.path?): No 

module named mysite.setting

I tried various things including trying to set the environmental variables differently. I finally installed Python-2.7.6, an upgrade from Python 2.7.3 I was using, to solved the problem. To get a working system on Windows 8 I used Python 2.7.6, Django 1.6, msql-installer-community-5.6.15.0, and MySQL-python-1.2.4b4.win32-py2.7. The trick is to find versions that work together. This can be done by trial and error since it is not always easy to find documentation that tells you. I tried to use the most recent stable releases of Django, Python, and MySQL.

To start the development server I attempted to run: 

 python manage.py runserver

I got:

  from django.core.exceptions import ImproperlyConfigured ... configured. " 

"Please supply the ENGINE value. Check ". "settings documentation for more details.")

This led me to believe that I needed to go back to the mysite.settings.py file. I 

double checked my settings but found nothing to correct this error. I remember 

reading something about setting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE in the Environment 

variables. I created a DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE variable in the environment system. I 

set it equal to C:/python_projects/mysite/mysite.settings.py. That didn't work but 

when I was in the outer mysite directory on the command line I used: 

set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE= mysite.settings

and after that ran 

python manage.py runserver 

and had no problems after that continuing through the tutorial. 

 So once again I have run into compatibility problems with updates of software. Each 

release is a little different enough to cause problems. Users need to be aware of 

these conflicts that can occur so they have something else to try when they hit a 

brick wall in developing.