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 settings_local.py and a settings_production.py. After trying several options I've found that it's easy to waste time with complex solutions when simply having two settings files feels easy and fast.

When you use mod_python/mod_wsgi for your Django project you need to point it to your settings file. If you point it to app/settings_local.py on your local server and app/settings_production.py on your production server then life becomes easy. Just edit the appropriate settings file and restart the server (Django development server will restart automatically).