Question

I am running Django in a virtual environment (using virtualenv), and I’m trying to add a custom development environment settings file to simplify app configuration when I’m developing. My plan was to do this with two lines of code

if os.environ.get('DEVELOPMENT', None):
    from login import settings_dev

I’ve also tried import settings_def and from login.settings_dev import *. My settings_dev.py file is sitting in the same directory as my settings.py file and my app is sitting in a folder called login. When I run python login/manage.py syncdb I get this error:

Error: Import by filename is not supported.

My searching keeps bringing up DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE (though I’m not sure how it plays into all this – first Django app :]), so just an FYI it is set in my settings.py file like so:

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'login.settings'

I’ve also tried exporting it in my terminal, but I get the same error.

Does anyone know how I can fix this/what I’m doing wrong here?

Answer 1

In the original settings.py, at the very end:

try:
    from settings_dev import *
except ImportError:
    pass

Create settings_dev.py in the same directory as settings.py, and in it, add these two lines at the very top:

import sys
globals().update(vars(sys.modules['settings']))

Now add whatever development settings you want in this file.