Rails-like configuration style for Django »

Published on August 22, 2010.

Django's default settings system is not very suitable for multiple configuration profiles — development, testing, production and so on: you have the settings.py, and that's it. As far as I'm concerned, my settings are sometimes very different between my notebook and for instance my production server. First of all, it is obviously out of the question to change the settings.py on deployment. Some people append at the end of their settings.py a simple from deploy import *, surrounded by a try / except ImportError clause. In my opinion this workaround is neither sexy nor flexible. I finally decided to use the Rails way to manage configuration in my latest pet project.

The principle is simple: replace the content of the settings.py by the one provided further, create a config/ directory, as if it is an application, and in this folder, put the default configuration in __init__.py, and add a Python module per configuration profile. You should come up with something like that:

The default profile is 'development' (read the settings.py). If you want to use a specific profile, prepend DJANGO_ENV="theprofile" to your shell command. It must become very long to type this at each command, that's why I recommend you to add this line to the 'bin/activate' script of the corresponding virtualenv, or in your ~/.bash_profile.