django-configurations 0.3

A helper for organizing Django settings.

django-configurations eases Django project configuration by relying on the composability of Python classes. It extends the notion of Django’s module based settings loading with well established object oriented programming patterns.

Quickstart

Install django-configurations:

pip install django-configurations

Then subclass the included configurations.Settings class in your project’s settings.py or any other module you’re using to store the settings constants, e.g.:

# mysite/settings.py

from configurations import Settings

class Dev(Settings):
    DEBUG = True

Set the DJANGO_CONFIGURATION environment variable to the name of the class you just created, e.g. in bash:

export DJANGO_CONFIGURATION=Dev

and the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to the module import path as usual, e.g. in bash:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings

Alternatively supply the --configuration option when using Django management commands along the lines of Django’s default --settings command line option, e.g.:

python manage.py runserver --settings=mysite.settings --configuration=Dev

To enable Django to use your configuration you now have to modify your manage.py or wsgi.py script to use django-configurations’s versions of the appropriate starter functions, e.g. a typical manage.py using django-configurations would look like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import sys

if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.settings')
    os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_CONFIGURATION', 'Dev')

    from configurations.management import execute_from_command_line

    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)

Notice in line 9 we don’t use the common tool django.core.management.execute_from_command_line but instead configurations.management.execute_from_command_line.

The same applies to your wsgi.py file, e.g.:

import os

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.settings')
os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_CONFIGURATION', 'Dev')

from configurations.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

application = get_wsgi_application()

Here we don’t use the default django.core.wsgi.get_wsgi_application function but instead configurations.wsgi.get_wsgi_application.

That’s it! You can now use your project with manage.py and your favorite WSGI enabled server.