Manage Django Development and Production Settings

While django makes it easy to get an application up and running locally, the default setting is unsuitible for production use. It is a good practice to break down the default settings.py module into multiple files to seperate development settings and production settings.

Basic structure

An empty new django site looks like this:

mysite/
 |-- mysite/
 |    |-- __init__.py
 |    |-- settings.py
 |    |-- urls.py
 |    +-- wsgi.py
 +-- manage.py

We want to group different setting files together. So create a folder named settings, rename the settings.py file to base.py and move it into the newly created settings folder. Then we can create dev.py and production.py for development and production settings resepctively. Now the file structure would look like this:

mysite/
|-- mysite/
|    |-- __init__.py
|    |-- settings/
|    |    |-- __init__.py
|    |    |-- base.py
|    |    |-- dev.py
|    |    |-- production.py
|    |    +-- staging.py
|    |-- urls.py
|    +-- wsgi.py
+-- manage.py

Config setting files

The settings/base.py file has all common settings in it. Other settings just extend base.py module like this:

# settings/dev.py
from .base import *
DEBUG = True

And production.py module usually read senstive infomation like SECRET_KEY from environment variable or local .env file.

# settings/production.py
from .base import *
DEBUG = False
env = os.environ.copy()
SECRET_KEY = env['SECRET_KEY']

Use setting file on demand

Use it through command line

We can pass which settings.py module to use in the coomand line when we start manage.py:

python manage.py runserver --settings=mysite.settings.dev
python manage.py runserver --settings=mysite.settings.production

Change manage.py

By default we start django site with manage.py and it uses development as default setting:

import os
import sys
if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")
    ...

We can change the line os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings") to os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings.dev") for dev settings or os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings.production") for production settings.

Set environment variabel

From above we can see that django manage.py actually use environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE for specific setting module. We can set this variable before running django:

Unix bash shell:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings.dev

or windows shell:

set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings.dev