Question

My django project has two environments – development and test. Today I carelessly overwrote the settings.py in test with the one in development. It took me a while to correct the settings in test, which could have been avoided if I have a good way to maintain the two sets of settings separately.

I was thinking to keep two separate copies of settings.py and rename/move them when needed. This, however, is kinda caveman approach. Are there any smarter ways of dealing with this problem?

Answer 1

1. At the end of your settings.py file, add this:

   try:
       from settings_dev import *
   except ImportError: pass
   

   Where settings_dev.py will contain the dev settings. And in your production env, do not push settings_dev (just ignore it in .gitingore or your source code versioning system.)

   So, when ever settings_dev.py is present, the settings.py will be overwritten by the settings_dev.py file.

2. One more approach by setting the environment variable:

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

   mentioned here: Django settings.py for development and production

I prefer the first one, it’s simple and just works.