Question

Looking in django.conf I noticed that settings are implemented like this:

class LazySettings(LazyObject):     
...

What is the rationale behind making settings objects lazy?

Answer 1

Check out this section of the Django coding style. The reason is explained in there (quoted below).

In addition to performance, third-party modules can modify settings when they are imported. Accessing settings should be delayed to ensure this configuration happens first.

Modules should not in general use settings stored in
django.conf.settings at the top level (i.e. evaluated when the module
is imported). The explanation for this is as follows:

Manual configuration of settings (i.e. not relying on the
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable) is allowed and possible
as follows:

from django.conf import settings

settings.configure({}, SOME_SETTING='foo')

However, if any setting is
accessed before the settings.configure line, this will not work.
(Internally, settings is a LazyObject which configures itself
automatically when the settings are accessed if it has not already
been configured).

So, if there is a module containing some code as follows:

from django.conf import settings
from django.core.urlresolvers import get_callable

default_foo_view = get_callable(settings.FOO_EXAMPLE_VIEW)

…then importing
this module will cause the settings object to be configured. That
means that the ability for third parties to import the module at the
top level is incompatible with the ability to configure the settings
object manually, or makes it very difficult in some circumstances.

Instead of the above code, a level of laziness or indirection must be
used, such as django.utils.functional.LazyObject,
django.utils.functional.lazy() or lambda.