How to manage local vs production settings in Django

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 every time 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         Edit  looks like there is no standard answer to this question  I ve accepted the most popular method

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Making multiple versions of settings py is an anti pattern for 12 Factor App methodology  use python-decouple or django-environ instead

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The problem with most of these solutions is that you either have your local settings applied before the common ones  or after them   So it s impossible to override things like   the env-specific settings define the addresses for the memcached pool  and in the main settings file this value is used to configure the cache backend the env-specific settings add or remove apps middleware to the default one   at the same time   One solution can be implemented using  ini -style config files with the ConfigParser class  It supports multiple files  lazy string interpolation  default values and a lot of other goodies  Once a number of files have been loaded  more files can be loaded and their values will override the previous ones  if any   You load one or more config files  depending on the machine address  environment variables and even values in previously loaded config files  Then you just use the parsed values to populate the settings    One strategy I have successfully used has been    Load a default defaults ini file Check the machine name  and load all files which matched the reversed FQDN  from the shortest match to the longest match  so  I loaded net ini  then net domain ini  then net domain webserver01 ini  each one possibly overriding values of the previous   This account also for developers  machines  so each one could set up its preferred database driver  etc  for local development Check if there is a  cluster name  declared  and in that case load cluster cluster name ini  which can define things like database and cache IPs   As an example of something you can achieve with this  you can define a  subdomain  value per-env  which is then used in the default settings  as hostname    subdomain  whatever net  to define all the necessary hostnames and cookie things django needs to work   This is as DRY I could get  most  existing  files had just 3 or 4 settings  On top of this I had to manage customer configuration  so an additional set of configuration files  with things like database names  users and passwords  assigned subdomain etc  existed  one or more per customer   One can scale this as low or as high as necessary  you just put in the config file the keys you want to configure per-environment  and once there s need for a new config  put the previous value in the default config  and override it where necessary   This system has proven reliable and works well with version control  It has been used for long time managing two separate clusters of applications  15 or more separate instances of the django site per machine   with more than 50 customers  where the clusters were changing size and members depending on the mood of the sysadmin

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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

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I am also working with Laravel and I like the implementation there  I tried to mimic it and combining it with the solution proposed by T  Stone  look above    PRODUCTION SERVERS       webfaction com     whatever com     def check env        for item in PRODUCTION SERVERS          match   re match r        item         socket gethostname            if match              return True  if check env        PRODUCTION   True else      PRODUCTION   False  DEBUG   not PRODUCTION   Maybe something like this would help you

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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

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As an alternative to maintain different file if you wiil  If you are using git or any other VCS to push codes from local to server  what you can do is add the settings file to  gitignore   This will allow you to have different content in both places without any problem  SO on server you can configure an independent version of settings py and any changes made on the local wont reflect on server and vice versa   In addition  it will remove the settings py file from github also  the big fault  which i have seen many newbies doing

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1 - Create a new folder inside your app and name settings to it   2 - Now create a new   init   py file in it and inside it write  from  base import    try      from  local import   except      pass  try      from  production import   except      pass   3 - Create three new files in the settings folder name local py and production py and base py   4 - Inside base py  copy all the content of previous settings py folder and rename it with something different  let s say old settings py   5 - In base py change your BASE DIR path to point to your new path of setting  Old path-  BASE DIR   os path dirname os path dirname os path abspath   file       New path -  BASE DIR   os path dirname os path dirname os path dirname os path abspath   file       This way  the project dir can be structured and can be manageable among production and local development

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Instead of settings py  use this layout      -- settings         --   init   py   lt   not versioned        -- common py        -- dev py        -- prod py   common py is where most of your configuration lives   prod py imports everything from common  and overrides whatever it needs to override   from   future   import absolute import   optional  but I like it from  common import      Production overrides DEBUG   False        Similarly  dev py imports everything from common py and overrides whatever it needs to override   Finally    init   py is where you decide which settings to load  and it s also where you store secrets  therefore this file should not be versioned    from   future   import absolute import from  prod import      or  dev if you want dev        DJANGO SECRETS SECRET KEY     3gd6shenud  amp 57     DATABASES  default    PASSWORD      f9kGH            OTHER SECRETS AWS SECRET ACCESS KEY    h50fH       What I like about this solution is    Everything is in your versioning system  except secrets Most configuration is in one place  common py  Prod-specific things go in prod py  dev-specific things go in dev py   It s simple  You can override stuff from common py in prod py or dev py  and you can override anything in   init   py  It s straightforward python   No re-import hacks

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In settings py   try      from local settings import   except ImportError as 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

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I manage my configurations with the help of django-split-settings    It is a drop-in replacement for the default settings  It is simple  yet configurable  And refactoring of your exisitng settings is not required   Here s a small example  file example settings   init   py    from split settings tools import optional  include import os  if os environ  DJANGO SETTINGS MODULE       example settings       include           components default py            components database py             This file may be missing          optional  local settings py             scope globals           That s it   Update  I wrote a blog post about managing django s settings with django-split-sttings  Have a look

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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

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I found the responses here very helpful   Has this been more definitively solved  The last response was a year ago   After considering all the approaches listed  I came up with a solution that I didn t see listed here    My criteria were    Everything should be in source control  I don t like fiddly bits lying around   Ideally  keep settings in one file  I forget things if I m not looking right at them    No manual edits to deploy  Should be able to test push deploy with a single fabric command  Avoid leaking development settings into production  Keep as close as possible to  standard    cough   Django layout as possible     I thought switching on the host machine made some sense  but then figured the real issue here is different settings for different environments  and had an aha moment  I put this code at the end of my settings py file   try      os environ  DJANGO DEVELOPMENT SERVER     throws error if unset     DEBUG   True     TEMPLATE DEBUG   True       This is naive but possible  Could also redeclare full app set to control ordering         Note that it requires a list rather than the generated tuple      INSTALLED APPS extend            debug toolbar            django nose                Production database settings  alternate static media paths  etc    except KeyError       print  DJANGO DEVELOPMENT SERVER environment var not set  using production settings    This way  the app defaults to production settings  which means you are explicitly  whitelisting  your development environment  It is much safer to forget to set the environment variable locally than if it were the other way around and you forgot to set something in production and let some dev settings be used    When developing locally  either from the shell or in a  bash profile or wherever     export DJANGO DEVELOPMENT SERVER yep    Or if you re developing on Windows  set via the Control Panel or whatever its called these days    Windows always made it so obscure that you could set environment variables    With this approach  the dev settings are all in one  standard  place  and simply override the production ones where needed  Any mucking around with development settings should be completely safe to commit to source control with no impact on production

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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

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I use a variation of what jpartogi mentioned above  that I find a little shorter   import platform from django core management import execute manager   computername   platform node    try    settings     import   computername     settings   except ImportError     import sys   sys stderr write  Error  Can t find the file   r 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     computername    file       sys exit 1   if   name         main       execute manager settings    Basically on each computer  development or production  I have the appropriate hostname settings py file that gets dynamically loaded

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I had my settings split as follows    settings               - base py       - dev py       - prod py     We have 3 environments     dev staging production     Now obviously staging and production should have the maximum possible similar environment  So we kept prod py for both   But there was a case where I had to identify running server is a production server   T  Stone  s answer helped me write check as follows     from socket import gethostname  gethostbyname   PROD HOSTS     webserver1    webserver2    DEBUG   False ALLOWED HOSTS    gethostname    gethostbyname gethostname        if any host in PROD HOSTS for host in ALLOWED HOSTS       SESSION COOKIE SECURE   True     CSRF COOKIE SECURE   True

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For most of my projects I use following pattern    Create settings base py where I store settings that are common for all environments  Whenever I need to use new environment with specific requirements I create new settings file  eg  settings local py  which inherits contents of settings base py and overrides adds proper settings variables  from settings base import       To run manage py with custom settings file you simply use --settings command option  manage py  lt command gt  --settings settings you wish to use py

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TL DR  The trick is to modify os environment before you import settings base py in any settings  lt purpose gt  py  this will greatly simplify things     Just thinking about all these intertwining files gives me a headache   Combining  importing  sometimes conditionally   overriding  patching of what was already set in case DEBUG setting changed later on   What a nightmare   Through the years I went through all different solutions  They all somewhat work  but are so painful to manage   WTF  Do we really need all that hassle  We started with just one settings py file   Now we need a documentation just to correctly combine all these together in a correct order   I hope I finally hit the  my  sweet spot with the solution below   Let s recap the goals  some common  some mine    Keep secrets a secret     don t store them in a repo  Set read keys and secrets through environment settings  12 factor style  Have sensible fallback defaults  Ideally for local development you don t need anything more beside defaults     but try to keep defaults production safe  It s better to miss a setting override locally   than having to remember to adjust default settings safe for production  Have the ability to switch DEBUG on off in a way that can have an effect on other settings  eg  using javascript compressed or not   Switching between purpose settings  like local testing staging production  should be based only on DJANGO SETTINGS MODULE  nothing more     but allow further parameterization through environment settings like DATABASE URL     also allow them to use different purpose settings and run them locally side by side  eg  production setup on local developer machine  to access production database or smoke test compressed style sheets  Fail if an environment variable is not explicitly set  requiring an empty value at minimum   especially in production  eg  EMAIL HOST PASSWORD  Respond to default DJANGO SETTINGS MODULE set in manage py during django-admin startproject Keep conditionals to a minimum  if the condition is the purposed environment type  eg  for production set log file and it s rotation   override settings in associated purposed settings file       Do not s   Do not let django read DJANGO SETTINGS MODULE setting form a file  Ugh  Think of how meta this is  If you need to have a file  like docker env  read that into the environment before staring up a django process  Do not override DJANGO SETTINGS MODULE in your project app code  eg  based on hostname or process name  If you are lazy to set environment variable  like for setup py test  do it in tooling just before you run your project code  Avoid magic and patching of how django reads it s settings  preprocess the settings but do not interfere afterwards   No complicated logic based nonsense  Configuration should be fixed and materialized not computed on the fly   Providing a fallback defaults is just enough logic here  Do you really want to debug  why locally you have correct set of settings but in production on a remote server   on one of hundred machines  something computed differently  Oh  Unit tests  For settings  Seriously          Solution  My strategy consists of excellent django-environ used with ini style files   providing os environment defaults for local development  some minimal and short settings  lt purpose gt  py files that have an  import settings base py AFTER the os environment was set from an INI file  This effectively give us a kind of settings injection   The trick here is to modify os environment before you import settings base py   To see the full example go do the repo  https   github com wooyek django-settings-strategy         manage py  ---data  ---website      ---settings                 init   py    lt -- imports local for compatibility               base py        lt -- almost all the settings  reads from proces environment                local py       lt -- a few modifications for local development               production py  lt -- ideally is empty and everything is in base                testing py     lt -- mimics production with a reasonable exeptions                env           lt -- for local use  not kept in repo            init   py          urls py          wsgi py   settings  env  A defaults for local development  A secret file  to mostly set required environment variables   Set them to empty values if they are not required in local development   We provide defaults here and not in settings base py to fail on any other machine if the re missing from the environment   settings local py  What happens in here  is loading environment from settings  env  then importing common settings  from settings base py  After that we can override a few to ease local development   import logging import environ  logging debug  Settings loading   s      file       This will read missing environment variables from a file   We wan to do this before loading a base settings as they may depend on environment environ Env read env DEBUG  True    from  base import    ALLOWED HOSTS           127 0 0 1        localhost         example com        vagrant            https   docs djangoproject com en 1 6 topics email  console-backend EMAIL BACKEND    django core mail backends console EmailBackend    EMAIL BACKEND    django core mail backends dummy EmailBackend   LOGGING  handlers    mail admins    email backend      django core mail backends dummy EmailBackend     Sync task testing   http   docs celeryproject org en 2 5 configuration html highlight celery always eager celery-always-eager  CELERY ALWAYS EAGER   True CELERY EAGER PROPAGATES EXCEPTIONS   True   settings production py  For production we should not expect an environment file  but it s easier to have one if we re testing something   But anyway  lest s provide few defaults inline  so settings base py can respond accordingly    environ Env read env Path   file       production env   DEBUG  False   ASSETS DEBUG  False   from  base import     The main point of interest here are DEBUG and ASSETS DEBUG overrides   they will be applied to the python os environ ONLY if they are MISSING from the environment and the file    These will be our production defaults  no need to put them in the environment or file  but they can be overridden if needed  Neat   settings base py  These are your mostly vanilla django settings  with a few conditionals and lot s of reading them from the environment   Almost everything is in here  keeping all the purposed environments consistent and as similar as possible   The main differences are below  I hope these are self explanatory    import environ    https   github com joke2k django-environ env   environ Env      Build paths inside the project like this  os path join BASE DIR       BASE DIR   os path dirname os path dirname os path dirname os path abspath   file          Where BASE DIR is a django source root  ROOT DIR is a whole project root   It may differ BASE DIR for eg  when your django project code is in  src  folder   This may help to separate python modules and  django apps  from other stuff   like documentation  fixtures  docker settings ROOT DIR   BASE DIR    Quick-start development settings - unsuitable for production   See https   docs djangoproject com en 1 11 howto deployment checklist     SECURITY WARNING  keep the secret key used in production secret  SECRET KEY   env  SECRET KEY      SECURITY WARNING  don t run with debug turned on in production  DEBUG   env  DEBUG   default False   INTERNAL IPS          127 0 0 1      ALLOWED HOSTS       if  ALLOWED HOSTS  in os environ      hosts   os environ  ALLOWED HOSTS   split          BASE URL    https       hosts 0      for host in hosts          host   host strip           if host              ALLOWED HOSTS append host   SECURE SSL REDIRECT   env bool  SECURE SSL REDIRECT   default False        Database   https   docs djangoproject com en 1 11 ref settings  databases  if  DATABASE URL  in os environ     pragma  no cover       Enable database config through environment     DATABASES               Raises ImproperlyConfigured exception if DATABASE URL not in os environ          default   env db                 Make sure we use have all settings we need       DATABASES  default    ENGINE      django contrib gis db backends postgis      DATABASES  default    TEST       NAME   os environ get  DATABASE TEST NAME   None       DATABASES  default    OPTIONS                options    -c search path gis public pg catalog            sslmode    require         else      DATABASES              default                  ENGINE    django db backends sqlite3                  ENGINE    django contrib gis db backends spatialite                NAME   os path join ROOT DIR   data    db dev sqlite3                 TEST                      NAME   os path join ROOT DIR   data    db test sqlite3                                      STATIC ROOT   os path join ROOT DIR   static      django-assets   http   django-assets readthedocs org en latest settings html  ASSETS LOAD PATH   STATIC ROOT ASSETS ROOT   os path join ROOT DIR   assets    compressed   ASSETS DEBUG   env  ASSETS DEBUG   default DEBUG     Disable when testing compressed file in DEBUG mode if ASSETS DEBUG      ASSETS URL   STATIC URL     ASSETS MANIFEST    json     format os path join ASSETS ROOT   manifest json    else      ASSETS URL   STATIC URL    assets compressed       ASSETS MANIFEST    json     format os path join STATIC ROOT   assets    compressed    manifest json    ASSETS AUTO BUILD   ASSETS DEBUG ASSETS MODULES     website assets      The last bit shows the power here  ASSETS DEBUG has a sensible default   which can be overridden in settings production py and even that that can be overridden by an environment setting  Yay    In effect we have a mixed hierarchy of importance    settings  py - sets defaults based on purpose  does not store secrets settings base py - is mostly controlled by environment  process environment settings - 12 factor baby  settings  env - local defaults for easy startup

User · Answer

I think the best solution is suggested by  T  Stone  but I don t know why just don t use the DEBUG flag in Django  I Write the below code for my website   if DEBUG      from  local settings import     Always the simple solutions are better than complex ones

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In order to use different settings configuration on different environment  create different settings file  And in your deployment script  start the server using --settings  lt my-settings py gt  parameter  via which you can use different settings on different environment   Benefits of using this approach    Your settings will be modular based on each environment You may import the master settings py containing the base configuration in the environmnet configuration py and override the values that you want to change in that environment  If you have huge team  each developer may have their own local settings py which they can add to the code repository without any risk of modifying the server configuration  You can add these local settings to  gitnore if you use git or  hginore if you Mercurial for Version Control  or any other   That way local settings won t even be the part of actual code base keeping it clean

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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

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Two Scoops of Django  Best Practices for Django 1 5 suggests using version control for your settings files and storing the files in a separate directory   project      app1      app2      project            init   py         settings                init   py             base py             local py             production py     manage py   The base py file contains common settings  such as MEDIA ROOT or ADMIN   while local py and production py have site-specific settings   In the base file settings base py   INSTALLED APPS           common apps        In the local development settings file settings local py   from project settings base import    DEBUG   True INSTALLED APPS           debug toolbar     and other apps for local development     In the file production settings file settings production py   from project settings base import    DEBUG   False INSTALLED APPS            other apps for production site     Then when you run django  you add the --settings option     Running django for local development     manage py runserver 0 8000 --settings project settings local    Running django shell on the production site     manage py shell --settings project settings production   The authors of the book have also put up a sample project layout template on Github

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There is also Django Classy Settings  I personally am a big fan of it  It s built by one of the most active people on the Django IRC  You would use environment vars to set things   http   django-classy-settings readthedocs io en latest

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