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 differentiate it in manage.py and created two separate settings file: local_settings.py and prod_settings.py.

In manage.py I check whether the server is local server or production server. If it is a local server it would load up local_settings.py and it is a production server it would load up prod_settings.py. Basically this is how it would look like:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import socket
from django.core.management import execute_manager 

ipaddress = socket.gethostbyname( socket.gethostname() )
if ipaddress == '127.0.0.1':
    try:
        import local_settings # Assumed to be in the same directory.
        settings = local_settings
    except ImportError:
        import sys
        sys.stderr.write("Error: Can't find the file 'local_settings.py' in the directory containing %r. It appears you've customized things.\nYou'll have to run django-admin.py, passing it your settings module.\n(If the file local_settings.py does indeed exist, it's causing an ImportError somehow.)\n" % __file__)
        sys.exit(1)
else:
    try:
        import prod_settings # Assumed to be in the same directory.
        settings = prod_settings    
    except ImportError:
        import sys
        sys.stderr.write("Error: Can't find the file 'prod_settings.py' in the directory containing %r. It appears you've customized things.\nYou'll have to run django-admin.py, passing it your settings module.\n(If the file prod_settings.py does indeed exist, it's causing an ImportError somehow.)\n" % __file__)
        sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    execute_manager(settings)

I found it to be easier to separate the settings file into two separate file instead of doing lots of ifs inside the settings file.