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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T10:34:34+00:00

I have a small project that I want to deploy to both Heroku and

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I have a small project that I want to deploy to both Heroku and OpenShift, to try things out on both platforms. I’m using Python/Django So I want to take advantage of the dynamic import feature to define settings per environment, maintaining a settings module for those platforms I want to deploy to, like:

my_project/
    settings/
        __init__.py  <-- This is what's being imported during app init, here is where I want to detect which platform specific settings module to load
        dev_settings.py
        heroku_settings.py
        openshift_settings.py

So far I use this code:

ENVIRONMENT = the_function_or_code_that_returns_the_environment() # Defaults to "dev"
from django.utils.importlib import import_module

try:
    # Import any symbols that begin with A-Z. Append to lists any symbols that
    # begin with "EXTRA_".
    local_settings_module_name = '%s_settings' % ENVIRONMENT
    local_settings = import_module(local_settings_module_name)
    import re
    for attr in dir(local_settings):
        match = re.search('^EXTRA_(\w+)', attr)
        if match:
            name = match.group(1)
            value = getattr(local_settings, attr)
            try:
                globals()[name] += value
            except KeyError:
                globals()[name] = value
        elif re.search('^[A-Z]', attr):
            globals()[attr] = getattr(local_settings, attr)
except ImportError:
    pass

It would be prefered to detect this via default (not set by me/developer) environment variables. Heroku expose just a few:

DATABASE_URL
ENVIRONMENT
LANG
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
LIBRARY_PATH
PATH
PYTHONHASHSEED
PYTHONHOME
PYTHONPATH
PYTHONUNBUFFERED
SHARED_DATABASE_URL

And OpenShift’s:

OPENSHIFT_DB_HOST
OPENSHIFT_LOG_DIR
OPENSHIFT_TMP_DIR
OPENSHIFT_DB_CTL_SCRIPT
OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR
OPENSHIFT_HOMEDIR
OPENSHIFT_GEAR_NAME
OPENSHIFT_PHPMYADMIN_IP
OPENSHIFT_RUNTIME_DIR
OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_PORT
OPENSHIFT_PHPMYADMIN_CTL_SCRIPT
OPENSHIFT_DB_MYSQL_51_RESTORE
OPENSHIFT_DB_MYSQL_51_DUMP
OPENSHIFT_DB_PASSWORD
OPENSHIFT_DB_USERNAME
OPENSHIFT_PHPMYADMIN_GEAR_DIR
OPENSHIFT_RUN_DIR
OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_IP
OPENSHIFT_GEAR_DIR
OPENSHIFT_GEAR_CTL_SCRIPT
OPENSHIFT_APP_DNS
OPENSHIFT_GEAR_TYPE
OPENSHIFT_GEAR_DNS
OPENSHIFT_DB_MYSQL_51_EMBEDDED_TYPE
OPENSHIFT_DB_URL
OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME
OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR
OPENSHIFT_DB_SOCKET
OPENSHIFT_GEAR_UUID
OPENSHIFT_APP_UUID
OPENSHIFT_DB_TYPE
OPENSHIFT_DB_MYSQL_51_DUMP_CLEANUP
OPENSHIFT_DB_PORT

OpenShift variables are prefixed with OPENSHIFT_ so there’s a start, but that’s not the case with Heroku.

How can I reliably detect the platform using environment variables?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    @Kevin, I’m posting my comment it as an answer, so people can see it quickly (or improve it!):

    if len([k for k in os.environ.keys() if k.startswith('OPENSHIFT_')]):
    ENVIRONMENT = 'openshift'
elif len([k for k in os.environ.values() if k.find('heroku') > -1]):
    ENVIRONMENT = 'heroku'

local_settings_module_name = '%s_settings' % ENVIRONMENT
local_settings = import_module(local_settings_module_name)
# do the magic with the `local_settings` module
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