How do you configure Django for simple development and deployment?

Question

I tend to use SQLite when doing Django development, but on a live server something more robust is often needed (MySQL/PostgreSQL, for example). Invariably, there are other c

Answer 1

I have my settings.py file in an external directory. That way, it doesn't get checked into source control, or over-written by a deploy. I put this in the settings.py file under my Django project, along with any default settings:

import sys
import os.path

def _load_settings(path):    
    print "Loading configuration from %s" % (path)
    if os.path.exists(path):
    settings = {}
    # execfile can't modify globals directly, so we will load them manually
    execfile(path, globals(), settings)
    for setting in settings:
        globals()[setting] = settings[setting]

_load_settings("/usr/local/conf/local_settings.py")

Note: This is very dangerous if you can't trust local_settings.py.