python - Execute code when Django starts ONCE only?

Question

I'm writing a Django Middleware class that I want to execute only once at startup, to initialise some other arbritary code. I've followed the very nice solution posted by sdolan here, but the "Hello" message is output to the terminal twice. E.g.

from django.core.exceptions import MiddlewareNotUsed
from django.conf import settings

class StartupMiddleware(object):
    def __init__(self):
        print "Hello world"
        raise MiddlewareNotUsed('Startup complete')

and in my Django settings file, I've got the class included in the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list.

But when I run Django using runserver and request a page, I get in the terminal

Django version 1.3, using settings 'config.server'
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
Hello world
[22/Jul/2011 15:54:36] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 698
Hello world
[22/Jul/2011 15:54:36] "GET /static/css/base.css HTTP/1.1" 200 0

Any ideas why "Hello world" is printed twice? Thanks.

Answer 1

Update: Django 1.7 now has a hook for this

file: myapp/apps.py

from django.apps import AppConfig
class MyAppConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'myapp'
    verbose_name = "My Application"
    def ready(self):
        pass # startup code here

file: myapp/__init__.py

default_app_config = 'myapp.apps.MyAppConfig'

For Django < 1.7

The number one answer does not seem to work anymore, urls.py is loaded upon first request.

What has worked lately is to put the startup code in any one of your INSTALLED_APPS init.py e.g. myapp/__init__.py

def startup():
    pass # load a big thing

startup()

When using ./manage.py runserver ... this gets executed twice, but that is because runserver has some tricks to validate the models first etc ... normal deployments or even when runserver auto reloads, this is only executed once.