How can I tell whether my Django application is running on development server or not?

Question

How can I be certain that my application is running on development server or not? I suppose I could check value of settings.DEBUG and assume if DEBUG

Answer 1

Relying on settings.DEBUG is the most elegant way AFAICS as it is also used in Django code base on occasion.

I suppose what you really want is a way to set that flag automatically without needing you update it manually everytime you upload the project to production servers.

For that I check the path of settings.py (in settings.py) to determine what server the project is running on:

if __file__ == "path to settings.py in my development machine":
    DEBUG = True
elif __file__ in [paths of production servers]:
    DEBUG = False
else:
    raise WhereTheHellIsThisServedException()

Mind you, you might also prefer doing this check with environment variables as @Soviut suggests. But as someone developing on Windows and serving on Linux checking the file paths was plain easier than going with environment variables.