Django-conch: Expose the Django shell as an SSH server (github.com)

Kind of. But of course that depends on what your deployment strategy is. I've worked in situations where the django project was deployed via 'pip install' into a virtualenv, which means the package would have been located in a site-packages directory, and there may have been older versions there too.

Plus, using system SSH involves a degree of sysadmin work which might not be possible on a platform like Heroku, for example.

I can't believe I'd never heard of SSH subsystems before.

I guess you could write one to invoke `manage.py shell`, and have it be deployed with your configuration management system.

When inspecting data during debugging (particularly for an issue that hasn't occurred before and doesn't have enough logging), I certainly may want something like this. Most of the time, I need permission from the sysadmin though to use my shell access in production to do these things.