Determine if Django is running under the development server

Question

Is there a way to determine if Django is running on localhost and setting the DEBUG variable in settings.py accordingly.

So that if I run the server locally it will set DEBUG to True and otherwise set it to False.

Localhost: python manage.py runserver
Not localhost: python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Answer 1

This is not the best approach, but it works :)
For something better you can use django-configurations

import sys    
# Determine if in Production or Development
if (len(sys.argv) >= 2 and sys.argv[1] == 'runserver'):
    DEBUG = True 
    #...       
else:
    DEBUG = False
    #...

Or you can use it as one-liner as mentioned by little_birdie in the comments:
DEBUG = (len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1] == 'runserver')

Answer 2

As suggested by Bernhard Vallant, you can just check for runserver in sys.argv.

You can just replace your DEBUG assignment in settings.py with this:

DEBUG = (sys.argv[1] == 'runserver')

You should also import sys somewhere in settings.py.