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

I came across this problem just now, and ended up writing a solution similar to Aryeh Leib Taurog's. My main difference is that I want to differentiate between a production and dev environments when running the server, but also when running some one-off scripts for my app (which I run like DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings python [the script] ). In this case, simply looking at whether argv[1] == runserver isn't enough. So what I came up with is to pass an extra command-line argument when I run the devserver, and also when I run my scripts, and just look for that argument in settings.py. So the code looks like this:

if '--in-development' in sys.argv:
    ## YES! we're in dev
    pass
else:
    ## Nope, this is prod
    pass

then, running the django server becomes

python manage.py runserver [whatever options you want] --in-development

and running my scripts is as easy as

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings python [myscript] --in-development

Just make sure the extra argument you pass along doens't conflict with anything django (in reality I use my app's name as part of the argument). I think this is pretty decent, as it lets me control exactly when my server and scripts will behave as prod or dev, and I'm not relying on anyone else's conventions, other than my own.

EDIT: manage.py complains if you pass unrecognized options, so you need to change the code in settings.py to be something like

if sys.argv[0] == 'manage.py' or '--in-development' in sys.argv:
    # ...
    pass

Although this works, I recognize it's not the most elegant of solutions...