How to settings.py for different environments (dev, production, etc.)

Question

I have a several environments for my project. DEV for development, BETA for beta testing, PRODUCTION for production deployment. Each of these environments share lot of settings, but have different databases.

I was wondering if there is any elegant solution to maintain settings.py for different environments without duplicating them in another settings.py file (e.g. using inheritance)

Thanks for your replies.

Answer 1

Setting files are just python modules. Often, the following structure is used:

settings/
|-- base.py
|-- production.py
|-- development.py

Then, in your environment-specific settings, at the top of the file you import all common settings:

from .base import *

Then you point the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to the appropriate settings module.