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

Usually this works:

import sys

if 'runserver' in sys.argv:
    # you use runserver

Answer 2

You could check request.META["SERVER_SOFTWARE"] value:

dev_servers = ["WSGIServer", "Werkzeug"]
if any(server in request.META["SERVER_SOFTWARE"] for server in dev_servers):
    print("is local")

Answer 3

I put the following in my settings.py to distinguish between the standard dev server and production:

import sys
RUNNING_DEVSERVER = (len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1] == 'runserver')

This also relies on convention, however.

(Amended per Daniel Magnusson's comment)

Answer 4

One difference between the development and deployment environment is going to be the server that it’s running on. What exactly is different will depend on your dev and deployment environments.

Knowing your own dev and deploy environments, the HTTP request variables could be used to distinguish between the two. Look at request variables like request.META.HTTP_HOST, request.META.SERVER_NAME and request.META.SERVER_PORT and compare them in the two environments.

I bet you’ll find something quite obvious that’s different and can be used to detect your development environment. Do the test in settings.py and set a variable that you can use elsewhere.

Answer 5

I came across this problem just now, and ended up writing a solution similar to Aryeh Leib Taurog's. My main difference is that I want to differentiate between a production and dev environments when running the server, but also when running some one-off scripts for my app (which I run like DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings python [the script] ). In this case, simply looking at whether argv[1] == runserver isn't enough. So what I came up with is to pass an extra command-line argument when I run the devserver, and also when I run my scripts, and just look for that argument in settings.py. So the code looks like this:

if '--in-development' in sys.argv:
    ## YES! we're in dev
    pass
else:
    ## Nope, this is prod
    pass

then, running the django server becomes

python manage.py runserver [whatever options you want] --in-development

and running my scripts is as easy as

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings python [myscript] --in-development

Just make sure the extra argument you pass along doens't conflict with anything django (in reality I use my app's name as part of the argument). I think this is pretty decent, as it lets me control exactly when my server and scripts will behave as prod or dev, and I'm not relying on anyone else's conventions, other than my own.

EDIT: manage.py complains if you pass unrecognized options, so you need to change the code in settings.py to be something like

if sys.argv[0] == 'manage.py' or '--in-development' in sys.argv:
    # ...
    pass

Although this works, I recognize it's not the most elegant of solutions...

Answer 6

If you want to switch your settings files automatically dependent on the runtime environment you could just use something that differs in environ, e.g.

from os import environ
if environ.get('_', ''): 
    print "This is dev - not Apache mod_wsgi"