Question

In django it’s very common to use a local_settings.py file to supplement settings.py so that each machine can have different settings. Usually people do something like this.

try:
    from local_settings import *
except ImportError:
    print "No local settings found!"

But the settings file usually contains large lists such as INSTALLED_APPS. If I want to add an app, I’d rather not copy the entire list into local_settings.py and modify it (makes for less readable code, and updating settings.py no longer affects any machine that re-writes INSTALLED_APPS). So I figured I could do something like this:

try:
    f = open('local_settings.py','r')
    exec f.read()
except IOError:
    print "No local settings found!"

Now local_settings.py no longer has to rewrite the entire INSTALLED_APPS variable:

INSTALLED_APPS.append('debug_toolbar')

I was under the impression that anytime you’re using exec or eval you’re probably doing something wrong. So my question is, is there anything wrong with this and is there a better way to do it?

Answer 1

This is my technique:

settings.py:

try:
    from local_settings import *
except ImportError:
    sys.exit("FATAL: No local settings file found.")

---

local_settings.py

import settings

settings.INSTALLED_APPS += ('django_extensions',)