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

For most of my projects I use following pattern:

1. Create settings_base.py where I store settings that are common for all environments
2. Whenever I need to use new environment with specific requirements I create new settings file (eg. settings_local.py) which inherits contents of settings_base.py and overrides/adds proper settings variables (from settings_base import *)

(To run manage.py with custom settings file you simply use --settings command option: manage.py --settings=settings_you_wish_to_use.py)