ImportError: cannot import name patterns

Use of patterns is deprecated since django 1.8. See docs. You can use plain lists now.

The use of patterns is deprecated in Django1.10. Therefore do not import 'patterns' and your url pattern should be as follows:

from django.conf.urls import include, url

urlpatterns=[
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(........),
]

I ran into this error when trying to install Django-Guardian. Instead of downgrading Django, you can install the latest version of Django-Guardian. Try,

pip install 'django-guardian>=1.4.6'

This resolved the issue for me.