Separate custom settings variable between development, staging and production

Question

I'm following the project structure as laid out by Zachary Voase, but I'm struggling with one specific issue.

I'd very much like to have a custom settings boolean variable (let's call it SEND_LIVE_MAIL) that I would be using in the project. Basically, I'd like to use this settings variable in my code and if SEND_LIVE_MAIL is True actually send out a mail, whereas when it is set to False just print its contents out to the console. The latter would apply to the dev environment and when running unittests.

What would be a good way of implementing this? Currently, depending on the environment, the django server uses dev, staging or prd settings, but for custom settings variables I believe these need to be imported 'literally'. In other words, I'd be using in my views something like

from settings.development import SEND_LIVE_MAIL

which of course isn't what I want. I'd like to be able to do something like:

from settings import SEND_LIVE_MAIL

and depending on the environment, the correct value is assigned to the SEND_LIVE_MAIL variable.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You shouldn't be importing directly from your settings files anyways. Use:

>>> from django.conf import settings
>>> settings.SEND_LIVE_MAIL
True

Answer 2

The simplest solution is to have this at the bottom of your settings file:

try:
    from local_settings import *
except ImportError:
    pass

And in local_settings.py specify all your environment-specific overrides. I generally don't commit this file to version control.

There are more advanced ways of doing it, where you end up with a default settings file and a per-environment override.

This article by David Cramer covers the various approaches, including both of the ones I've mentioned: http://justcramer.com/2011/01/13/settings-in-django/