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

I use a slightly modified version of the "if DEBUG" style of settings that Harper Shelby posted. Obviously depending on the environment (win/linux/etc.) the code might need to be tweaked a bit.

I was in the past using the "if DEBUG" but I found that occasionally I needed to do testing with DEUBG set to False. What I really wanted to distinguish if the environment was production or development, which gave me the freedom to choose the DEBUG level.

PRODUCTION_SERVERS = ['WEBSERVER1','WEBSERVER2',]
if os.environ['COMPUTERNAME'] in PRODUCTION_SERVERS:
    PRODUCTION = True
else:
    PRODUCTION = False

DEBUG = not PRODUCTION
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

# ...

if PRODUCTION:
    DATABASE_HOST = '192.168.1.1'
else:
    DATABASE_HOST = 'localhost'

I'd still consider this way of settings a work in progress. I haven't seen any one way to handling Django settings that covered all the bases and at the same time wasn't a total hassle to setup (I'm not down with the 5x settings files methods).