# Troubleshooting

## ImproperlyConfigured exception

    django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting INSTALLED_APPS, but settings are not configured.
    You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

This exception occurs when your application tries to import any models before Django finishes its initialization process aka `django.setup()`.

`django.setup()` should be called only once, and should be called manually only in case of standalone apps. In context of Channels usage, `django.setup()` is called automatically in `get_asgi_application()`, which means it needs to be called before any ORM models are imported.

The working code order would look like this:

    import os

    from channels.auth import AuthMiddlewareStack
    from channels.routing import ProtocolTypeRouter, URLRouter
    from django.conf.urls import url
    from django.core.asgi import get_asgi_application

    os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")
    # Initialize Django ASGI application early to ensure the AppRegistry
    # is populated before importing code that may import ORM models.
    django_asgi_app = get_asgi_application()

    from chat.consumers import AdminChatConsumer, PublicChatConsumer

    application = ProtocolTypeRouter({
        # Django's ASGI application to handle traditional HTTP requests
        "http": django_asgi_app,

        # WebSocket chat handler
        "websocket": AuthMiddlewareStack(
            URLRouter([
                url(r"^chat/admin/$", AdminChatConsumer.as_asgi()),
                url(r"^chat/$", PublicChatConsumer.as_asgi()),
            ])
        ),
    })