How to manage local vs production settings in Django?

Question

What is the recommended way of handling settings for local development and the production server? Some of them (like constants, etc) can be changed/accessed in both, but s

Answer 1

Instead of settings.py, use this layout:

.
└── settings/
    ├── __init__.py  <= not versioned
    ├── common.py
    ├── dev.py
    └── prod.py

common.py is where most of your configuration lives.

prod.py imports everything from common, and overrides whatever it needs to override:

from __future__ import absolute_import # optional, but I like it
from .common import *

# Production overrides
DEBUG = False
#...

Similarly, dev.py imports everything from common.py and overrides whatever it needs to override.

Finally, __init__.py is where you decide which settings to load, and it's also where you store secrets (therefore this file should not be versioned):

from __future__ import absolute_import
from .prod import *  # or .dev if you want dev

##### DJANGO SECRETS
SECRET_KEY = '(3gd6shenud@&57...'
DATABASES['default']['PASSWORD'] = 'f9kGH...'

##### OTHER SECRETS
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "h50fH..."

What I like about this solution is:

1. Everything is in your versioning system, except secrets
2. Most configuration is in one place: common.py.
3. Prod-specific things go in prod.py, dev-specific things go in dev.py. It's simple.
4. You can override stuff from common.py in prod.py or dev.py, and you can override anything in __init__.py.
5. It's straightforward python. No re-import hacks.