How can I tell whether my Django application is running on development server or not?

Question

How can I be certain that my application is running on development server or not? I suppose I could check value of settings.DEBUG and assume if DEBUG

Answer 1

Typically I set a variable called environment and set it to "DEVELOPMENT", "STAGING" or "PRODUCTION". Within the settings file I can then add basic logic to change which settings are being used, based on environment.

EDIT: Additionally, you can simply use this logic to include different settings.py files that override the base settings. For example:

if environment == "DEBUG":
    from debugsettings import *

Answer 2

You can determine whether you're running under WSGI (mod_wsgi, gunicorn, waitress, etc.) vs. manage.py (runserver, test, migrate, etc.) or anything else:

import sys
WSGI = 'django.core.wsgi' in sys.modules

Answer 3

Inspired by Aryeh's answer, the trick I devised for my own use is to just look for the name of my management script in sys.argv[0]:

USING_DEV_SERVER = "pulpdist/manage_site.py" in sys.argv[0]

(My use case is to automatically enable Django native authentication when running the test server - when running under Apache, even on development servers, all authentication for my current project is handled via Kerberos)

Answer 4

server = request.META.get('wsgi.file_wrapper', None)
if server is not None and server.__module__ == 'django.core.servers.basehttp':
    print('inside dev')

Of course, wsgi.file_wrapper might be set on META, and have a class from a module named django.core.servers.basehttp by extreme coincidence on another server environment, but I hope this will have you covered.

By the way, I discovered this by making a syntatically invalid template while running on the development server, and searched for interesting stuff on the Traceback and the Request information sections, so I'm just editing my answer to corroborate with Nate's ideas.

Answer 5

Relying on settings.DEBUG is the most elegant way AFAICS as it is also used in Django code base on occasion.

I suppose what you really want is a way to set that flag automatically without needing you update it manually everytime you upload the project to production servers.

For that I check the path of settings.py (in settings.py) to determine what server the project is running on:

if __file__ == "path to settings.py in my development machine":
    DEBUG = True
elif __file__ in [paths of production servers]:
    DEBUG = False
else:
    raise WhereTheHellIsThisServedException()

Mind you, you might also prefer doing this check with environment variables as @Soviut suggests. But as someone developing on Windows and serving on Linux checking the file paths was plain easier than going with environment variables.

Answer 6

settings.DEBUG could be True and running under Apache or some other non-development server. It will still run. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the run-time environment short of examining the pid and comparing to pids in the OS that will give you this information.