How to manage local vs production settings in Django?

Question

A Django newbie question:
What is the recommended way of handling settings for local development and the production server? Some of them (like Constants, etc) can be changed/accessed in both, but some of them (like paths to static files) need to remain different, and hence should not be overwritten everytime the new code is deployed...

Currently, I am adding all constants to settings.py. But every time I change some constant locally, I have to copy it to the production server and edit the file for production specific changes... :(

Answer 1

Remember that settings.py is a live code file. Assuming that you don't have DEBUG set on production (which is a best practice), you can do something like:

if DEBUG:
    STATIC_PATH = /path/to/dev/files
else:
    STATIC_PATH = /path/to/production/files

Pretty basic, but you could, in theory, go up to any level of complexity based on just the value of DEBUG - or any other variable or code check you wanted to use.

Answer 2

I use a settings_local.py and a settings_production.py. After trying several options I've found that it's easy to waste time with complex solutions when simply having two settings files feels easy and fast.

When you use mod_python/mod_wsgi for your Django project you need to point it to your settings file. If you point it to app/settings_local.py on your local server and app/settings_production.py on your production server then life becomes easy. Just edit the appropriate settings file and restart the server (Django development server will restart automatically).

Answer 3

I use a slightly modified version of the "if DEBUG" style of settings that Harper Shelby posted. Obviously depending on the environment (win/linux/etc.) the code might need to be tweaked a bit.

I was in the past using the "if DEBUG" but I found that occasionally I needed to do testing with DEUBG set to False. What I really wanted to distinguish if the environment was production or development, which gave me the freedom to choose the DEBUG level.

PRODUCTION_SERVERS = ['WEBSERVER1','WEBSERVER2',]
if os.environ['COMPUTERNAME'] in PRODUCTION_SERVERS:
    PRODUCTION = True
else:
    PRODUCTION = False

DEBUG = not PRODUCTION
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

# ...

if PRODUCTION:
    DATABASE_HOST = '192.168.1.1'
else:
    DATABASE_HOST = 'localhost'

I'd still consider this way of settings a work in progress. I haven't seen any one way to handling Django settings that covered all the bases and at the same time wasn't a total hassle to setup (I'm not down with the 5x settings files methods).

Answer 4

My solution to that problem is also somewhat of a mix of some solutions already stated here:

• I keep a file called local_settings.py that has the content USING_LOCAL = True in dev and USING_LOCAL = False in prod
• In settings.py I do an import on that file to get the USING_LOCAL setting

I then base all my environment-dependent settings on that one:

DEBUG = USING_LOCAL
if USING_LOCAL:
    # dev database settings
else:
    # prod database settings

I prefer this to having two separate settings.py files that I need to maintain as I can keep my settings structured in a single file easier than having them spread across several files. Like this, when I update a setting I don't forget to do it for both environments.

Of course that every method has its disadvantages and this one is no exception. The problem here is that I can't overwrite the local_settings.py file whenever I push my changes into production, meaning I can't just copy all files blindly, but that's something I can live with.

Answer 5

You might want to look at this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1406892/elegantly-handle-site-specific-settings-configuration-in-svn-hg-git-etc

Answer 6

settings.py

try:
   from local_settings import *
except ImportError, e:
   pass

You can override what needed in local_settings.py; it should stay out of your version control then. But since you mention copying I'm guessing you use none ;)

Answer 7

I differentiate it in manage.py and created two separate settings file: local_settings.py and prod_settings.py.

In manage.py I check whether the server is local server or production server. If it is a local server it would load up local_settings.py and it is a production server it would load up prod_settings.py. Basically this is how it would look like:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import socket
from django.core.management import execute_manager 

ipaddress = socket.gethostbyname( socket.gethostname() )
if ipaddress == '127.0.0.1':
    try:
        import local_settings # Assumed to be in the same directory.
        settings = local_settings
    except ImportError:
        import sys
        sys.stderr.write("Error: Can't find the file 'local_settings.py' in the directory containing %r. It appears you've customized things.\nYou'll have to run django-admin.py, passing it your settings module.\n(If the file local_settings.py does indeed exist, it's causing an ImportError somehow.)\n" % __file__)
        sys.exit(1)
else:
    try:
        import prod_settings # Assumed to be in the same directory.
        settings = prod_settings    
    except ImportError:
        import sys
        sys.stderr.write("Error: Can't find the file 'prod_settings.py' in the directory containing %r. It appears you've customized things.\nYou'll have to run django-admin.py, passing it your settings module.\n(If the file prod_settings.py does indeed exist, it's causing an ImportError somehow.)\n" % __file__)
        sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    execute_manager(settings)

I found it to be easier to separate the settings file into two separate file instead of doing lots of ifs inside the settings file.