django-kungfu 0.2

A Flasky approach to distributed Django configuration

django-kungfu

django-kungfu provides the ability to set-up the Django configuration mechanism so it’s fairly easy to integrate development or deployment-related settings overrides.

The idea came after I used for a while the beatiful configuration system implemented in Flask. In fact, the majority of the code was inspired by the Flask implementation located here.

Usage by example

The integration with your Django project is fairly easy and depends on your preferences. One possible set-up could look like this:

# At the bottom of your/settings.py file just add the following lines
from django_kungfu import Configurator
config = Configurator(locals())
config.from_pyfile(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'dev_settings.py'))
config.from_envvar('DJANGO_SETTINGS_OVERRIDE')

In short, this is what happens when the django settings file is loaded: # if the dev_settings.py file is found in the same directory as the settings file, all the upper-case constants are loaded into local context overriding the existing ones # if the DJANGO_SETTINGS_OVERRIDE environment variable is set and is pointing to a valid configuration file, that configuration file is loaded in the same way

By default, if the specified files or environment variables are not found or are not valid, the configurator will fail silently. This is useful for example when using development settings which are not available in a production system and we want to keep a single settings file as a configuration entry point.

If you want to enforce the presence of a particular configuration file or environment variable you can use silent=False with the respective methods.

Having this configuration, you can easily set-up a production environment by setting the appropriate environment variable in you production wsgi file:

# prod.wsgi
import os

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "myproject.settings")
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_OVERRIDE",
                      os.path.expanduser("~/etc/myproject/prod_settings.py"))

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()

Why kungfu?

This name was selected because kungfu pronounced in my natal language (a regional dialect of Romanian) sounds similar to config (confu). And of course my sympathy for martial arts, and especially for kung fu, brought a few points.