I've been having an issue that I believe can be solved one of 2 ways.  We have a django project I am trying to write some iPython notebooks for teaching purposes and have them in a tutorials directory that's one below the root of the project (i.e. ~/tutorials).  
In the beginning of the notebooks I need to import several modules but I encountered a similar problem to the one detailed in this stack overflow question: Relative imports in Python 3 , (python couldn't find the paths, even though it could when I ran the notebooks from the root directory)
My solution was to specify the absolute path to the root of the directory in a path variable and append it like the following:
import sys
path = 'Users/greg/project_name'
sys.path.append(path)
That worked and I have been able to make the imports. However, the problem I am encountering now is that when I run a function that calls get on a Django model like so:
Platform.objects.get(name='platform_name').platform_levels.get(db_name=level).id
it raises an error from the python3.4/site-packages/django/apps/registry.py file saying: 
AppRegistryNotReady: Models aren't loaded yet.
Does anybody have any insight into why they aren't being loaded and what I need to do differently? Please let me know if there's other information that I should provide to help you answer this question. Thanks!
Edit: The suggestion by @albar led to a new error which I think is the root of all the issues.  When I go to run django.setup(), it raises an error on this line: 
mod = importlib.import_module(self.SETTINGS_MODULE)
saying:
ImportError: No module named 'project_name'
Does it need to be able to import the entire project as a module and if so, how do I tell it how to find it?
 
     
    