Error when creating a django app in a specified folder with the same name as the app

[Nick Gilmour]

Hi all,

when I try to create a django app in a specified folder with the same name as the app I get the following error:

CommandError: 'my_app' conflicts with the name of an existing Python module and cannot be used as an app name. Please try another name.

These are the commands I'm using:

$ mkdir backend/apps/my_app

$ python manage startapp my_app ./backend/apps/my_app

Is this normal? Any ideas why is this happening?

Regards,

Nick

[Jason]

It appears normal

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/18564#comment:3

specifically

Django _already_ prevents you from creating a project with a package name that conflicts with some other package on sys.path; this is the most we can reasonably do.