The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty

[surfer190]

When opening scrapy shell or running crawl I get an error requesting the SECRET_KEY from django

raise ImproperlyConfigured("The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty.")
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty.

[surfer190]

Adding to settings:

SECRET_KEY = 'some-random-key'

fixes it but is it necessary?

[cdvv7788]

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/settings/#secret-key
In short, it is. The issue is related to django tho, not to scrapy.