🧭 Django Settings Inspector

Django Settings Inspector is a developer tool that extends Django’s built-in management commands to inspect and visualize project configuration in a structured and colorized format.

It helps you quickly understand, debug, and document your Django settings — whether you are auditing security, reviewing deployments, or checking environment consistency.

✨ Features

• 🔍 Inspect all Django configuration categories
• 🎨 Beautiful color output using Rich
• 🧩 Works as standard Django management commands
• 🧰 Includes standalone CLI (djinspect) for quick inspection
• ⚙️ Optional --filter keyword to narrow results (on all command)
• 🧪 Fully testable with pytest
• 💡 No side effects — purely read-only and safe

📦 Installation

From PyPI:

pip install django-settings-inspector

From source (for development):

git clone https://github.com/cumulus13/django-settings-inspector.git
cd django-settings-inspector
pip install -e .

⚙️ Setup

Add django_settings_inspector to your Django project’s INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "django_settings_inspector",
]

That’s it! You can now run any of the new management commands:

python manage.py all

Or use the standalone CLI:

djinspect all

⚙️ Usage

1️⃣ Import in your Django project

Instead of a giant settings.py, you can modularize it:

# settings.py
from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.core import *
from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.db import *
from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.cache import *
from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.logging import *
from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.security import *

Or load all in one line:

from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.all import *

2️⃣ Use the CLI inspector

List all detected settings:

django-settings-inspector all

Filter by keyword:

django-settings-inspector all --filter DATABASE

Example Output:

DATABASES:
  default:
    ENGINE: django.db.backends.sqlite3
    NAME: db.sqlite3

CACHES:
  default:
    BACKEND: django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache

3️⃣ Django management command

You can run it as a Django command too:

python manage.py all

With filters:

python manage.py all --filter TIME_ZONE

🧠 Example Workflow

Here’s how you might use it in a real-world Django project:

# Create new Django project
django-admin startproject myproject

# Optionally import Django Settings Inspector for exploration
cd myproject
echo "from django_settings_inspector.management.commands.all import *" >> settings.py

# Keep your existing settings below (do not remove SECRET_KEY or BASE_DIR)

# Run server
python manage.py runserver

And you’ll instantly have access to all modularized settings and their management commands.

🎨 Example Output

When rich is installed:

python manage.py static

Produces:

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Setting            ┃ Value                                                       ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ STATIC_URL         │ /static/                                                    │
│ STATIC_ROOT        │ BASE_DIR / "staticfiles"                                    │
│ STATICFILES_DIRS   │ ['assets', 'frontend/static']                               │
│ STATICFILES_STORAGE│ 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage'     │
└────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

🧰 CLI Options

🧩 Available Commands (run with django-admin)

🧰 CLI & Management Commands

This package exposes a set of Django management commands (usable with python manage.py <command>) and a small standalone CLI (djinspect) that currently wraps the all command.

Note: python manage.py <command> works inside any Django project that has django_settings_inspector installed and added to INSTALLED_APPS. djinspect is a lightweight CLI shipped with the package — at present it supports the all command. If you want it to proxy all commands, tell me and I’ll add it.

Global options

• -h, --help — show help for a command.
• --filter <keyword> (or -f <keyword>) — only supported by all; case-insensitive keyword filter for the aggregated output.

All commands (management commands included in the package)

Use python manage.py <command> (examples below). All commands print human-readable configuration; if rich is installed they will print a colored table/syntax-highlighted block.

• all Show grouped settings for many categories (Database, Cache, Static, Media, Auth, Security, Email, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py all
  python manage.py all --filter cache      # only sections/keys matching "cache"
  djinspect all --filter email            # CLI wrapper for 'all' (djinspect supports 'all')
  

• auth Show authentication-related settings (AUTH_USER_MODEL, AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS, login/logout URLs, password hashers, session auth-related keys). Example:

  python manage.py auth
  

• cache Show cache configuration (CACHES, CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_*, cacheops settings if present, USE_ETAGS, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py cache
  

• core Show core environment and security basics (BASE_DIR, DEBUG, masked SECRET_KEY, ALLOWED_HOSTS). Example:

  python manage.py core
  

• db Show database-related settings (DATABASES, DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD). Example:

  python manage.py db
  

• diffsettings Display the difference between project settings and Django defaults (similar to Django’s built-in diffsettings, but colorized if Rich is available). Example:

  python manage.py diffsettings
  

• email Show email configuration (EMAIL_BACKEND, EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_PORT, DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL, ADMINS, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py email
  

• installed Show INSTALLED_APPS and related app-level settings (e.g. DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD, MIGRATION_MODULES). Example:

  python manage.py installed
  

• locale Show internationalization and timezone settings (LANGUAGE_CODE, TIME_ZONE, USE_I18N, USE_TZ). Example:

  python manage.py locale
  

• logging Show logging configuration (LOGGING, LOGGING_CONFIG, DEFAULT_LOGGING, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py logging
  

• media Show media/file upload settings (MEDIA_URL, MEDIA_ROOT, DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE, and common cloud-storage vars if present). Example:

  python manage.py media
  

• middleware Show middleware stack plus related flags (MIDDLEWARE, MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, SECURE_*, CSRF_*, SESSION_*, CORS settings if present). Example:

  python manage.py middleware
  

• security Show security & HTTPS-related settings (CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE, SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE, SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT, HSTS settings, X_FRAME_OPTIONS, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py security
  

• session Show session-specific configuration (SESSION_ENGINE, cookie names, age, SESSION_SAVE_EVERY_REQUEST, SESSION_FILE_PATH, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py session
  

• site Site and environment-level settings (BASE_DIR, ROOT_URLCONF, WSGI_APPLICATION, ASGI_APPLICATION, ALLOWED_HOSTS, SITE_ID, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py site
  

• static Show static files settings (STATIC_URL, STATICFILES_DIRS, STATIC_ROOT, STATICFILES_STORAGE, STATICFILES_FINDERS, WhiteNoise options if present). Example:

  python manage.py static
  

• storage Show storage-related settings (DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE, STORAGES, upload limits and permissions, DATA_UPLOAD_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE, etc.). Example:

  python manage.py storage
  

• template Show template engine settings (TEMPLATES, TEMPLATE_DIRS, OPTIONS context processors/loaders/jinja options). Example:

  python manage.py template
  

• validator Show validation and password-related settings (AUTH_PASSWORD_VALIDATORS, PASSWORD_HASHERS, PASSWORD_RESET_TIMEOUT, etc.) and related auth redirect urls. Example:

  python manage.py validator
  

Example: colorized output (when rich installed)

python manage.py static
# prints a colored table with STATIC_URL, STATIC_ROOT, STATICFILES_DIRS, etc.

Notes & Tips

• djinspect CLI is provided as a convenience and currently runs the all command:

  djinspect all --filter cache
  

🧪 Tests (pytest)

tests/
├── __init__.py
├── conftest.py
├── test_core_commands.py
└── test_cli.py

Example test_cli.py

import subprocess
import sys

def test_cli_all_command():
    result = subprocess.run(
        [sys.executable, "-m", "django_settings_inspector.cli", "--filter", "DATABASE"],
        capture_output=True,
        text=True
    )
    assert "DATABASES" in result.stdout

def test_import_all():
    import django_settings_inspector.management.commands.all as allmod
    assert hasattr(allmod, "BASE_DIR")

Example test file: tests/test_core_commands.py

import pytest
from django.core.management import call_command

@pytest.mark.django_db
def test_all_command_runs_safely(settings):
    """Ensure 'all' command runs without error."""
    call_command("all")

def test_specific_command_outputs(settings, capsys):
    """Check output contains key variables."""
    call_command("core")
    captured = capsys.readouterr()
    assert "BASE_DIR" in captured.out

Run tests:

pytest -v

💡 Tips for Development

• Use pip install -e . during development
• Use python -m django_settings_inspector.cli to test CLI
• To publish to PyPI:

🧑‍💻 Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a new branch (git checkout -b feature/my-feature)
3. Commit changes (git commit -am 'Add my feature')
4. Push to your branch (git push origin feature/my-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

⚖️ License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

MIT © 2025 Hadi Cahyadi

author

Hadi Cahyadi

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