The Django settings module is one of the most important files in a Django web project. It contains all of the configuration for the project, both standard and custom. Django settings are really nice because they are written in Python instead of a text file format, meaning they can be set using code instead of literal values.

Settings must often use different values for different environments. The DEBUG setting is a perfect example: It should always be True in a development environment to help debug problems, but it should never be True in a production environment to avoid security holes. Another good example is the DATABASES setting: Development and test environments should not use production data. This article covers two good ways to handle environment-specific settings.

Multiple Settings Modules

The simplest way to handle environment-specific settings is to create a separate settings module for each environment. Different settings values would be assigned in each module. For example, instead of just one mysite.settings module, there could be:

mysite
`-- mysite
    |-- __init__.py
    |-- settings_dev.py
    |-- settings_prod.py
    `-- settings_test.py

For the DEBUG setting, mysite.settings_dev and mysite.settings_test would contain:

DEBUG = True

And mysite.settings_prod would contain:

DEBUG = False

Then, set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to the name of the desired settings module. The default value is mysite.settings, where “mysite” is the name of the project. Make sure to set this variable wherever the Django site is run. Also make sure that the settings module is available in PYTHONPATH.

More details on this approach are given on the Django settings page.

Using Environment Variables

One problem with multiple settings modules is that many settings won’t need to be different between environments. Duplicating these settings then violates the DRY principle (“don’t repeat yourself”). A more advanced approach for handling environment-specific settings is to use custom environment variables as Django inputs. Remember, the settings module is written in Python, so values can be set using calls and conditions. One settings module can be written to handle all environments.

Add a function like this to read environment variables:

# Imports
import os
from django.core.exceptions import ImproperlyConfigured

# Function
def read_env_var(name, default=None):
    if not value:
       raise ImproperlyConfigured("The %s value must be provided as an env variable" % name)
    return value

Then, use it to read environment variables in the settings module:

# Read the secret key directly
# This is a required value
# If the env variable is not found, the site will not launch
SECRET_KEY = read_env_var("SECRET_KEY")

# Read the debug setting
# Default the value to False
# Environment variables are strings, so the value must be converted to a Boolean
DEBUG = read_env_var("DEBUG", "False") == "True"

To avoid a proliferation of required environment variables, one variable could be used to specify the target environment like this:

# Read the target environment
TARGET_ENV = read_env_var("TARGET_ENV")

# Set the debug setting to True only for production
DEBUG = (TARGET_ENV == "prod")

# Set database config for the chosen environment
if TARGET_ENV == "dev":
    DATABASES = { ... }
elif TARGET_ENV == "prod":
    DATABASES = { ... }
elif TARGET_ENV == "test":
    DATABASES = { ... }

Managing environment variables can be pesky. A good way to manage them is using shell scripts. If the Django site will be deployed to Heroku, variables should be saved as config vars.

Conclusion

These are the two primary ways I recommend to handle different settings for different environments in a Django project. Personally, I prefer the second approach of using one settings module with environment variable inputs. Just make sure to reference all settings from the settings module (“from django.conf import settings”) instead of directly referencing environment variables!