title: "ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty" but SECRET_KEY is set
body: <p>I'm working with Django 1.11 and Apache 2.2. My SECRET_KEY suddenly stopped working, I'm getting an error "ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty." even though the SECRET_KEY is definitely set in my settings.py --</p>
  
  <p><strong>settings.py</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>SECRET_KEY = 'yaddayaddayadda'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I know that there are lot of similar questions and I've read many of the answers and I still don't understand what's going wrong here. It was working and to me it seemed like it suddenly stopped working. Deleting the *.pyc files did not help.</p>
  
  <p><strong>manage.py</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>wsgi.py</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>path_1 = '/home/path/proj_website/mysite'
  sys.path.append(path_1)
  
  path_2 = '/home/path/proj_website/mysite/mysite'
  sys.path.append(path_2)
  
  os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong></p>
  
  <p>I think my real problem is that my production server is not registering any changes to my settings.py file. I always do "touch wsgi.py" when I make a change and I cleared out my *pyc files and it's still not working. Like I said in a comment below, when I do "python manage.py runserver" it runs without error. So I don't think it's a path issue or an issue with project files but something with the web server. Any other suggestions of what I can try?</p>