Django: How to manage development and production settings?

The DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable controls which settings file Django will load.

You therefore create separate configuration files for your respective environments (note that they can of course both import * from a separate, “shared settings” file), and use DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to control which one to use.

Here’s how:

As noted in the Django documentation:

The value of DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should be in Python path syntax, e.g. mysite.settings. Note that the settings module should be on the Python import search path.

So, let’s assume you created myapp/production_settings.py and myapp/test_settings.py in your source repository.

In that case, you’d respectively set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myapp.production_settings to use the former and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myapp.test_settings to use the latter.

From here on out, the problem boils down to setting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable.

Setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE using a script or a shell

You can then use a bootstrap script or a process manager to load the correct settings (by setting the environment), or just run it from your shell before starting Django: export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myapp.production_settings.

Note that you can run this export at any time from a shell — it does not need to live in your .bashrc or anything.

Setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE using a Process Manager

If you’re not fond of writing a bootstrap script that sets the environment (and there are very good reasons to feel that way!), I would recommend using a process manager:

• Supervisor lets you pass environment variables to managed processes using a program’s environment configuration key.
• Honcho (a pure-Python equivalent of Ruby’s Foreman) lets you define environment variables in an “environment” (.env) file.

Finally, note that you can take advantage of the PYTHONPATH variable to store the settings in a completely different location (e.g. on a production server, storing them in /etc/). This allows for separating configuration from application files. You may or may not want that, it depends on how your app is structured.