Configuring settings for development, testing, staging, and production environments

As noted earlier, you will be creating new features in the development environment, test them in the testing environment, then put the website to a staging server to let other people to try the new features, and lastly, the website will be deployed to the production server for public access. Each of these environments can have specific settings and you will see how to organize them in this recipe.

Getting ready

In a Django project, we'll create settings for each environment: development, testing, staging, and production.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to configure project settings:

1. In myproject directory, create a conf Python module with the following files: __init__.py, base.py for shared settings, dev.py for development settings, test.py for testing settings, staging.py for staging settings, and prod.py for production settings.
2. Put all your shared settings in conf/base.py.
3. If the settings of an environment are the same as the shared settings, then just import everything from base.py there, as follows:

   # myproject/conf/prod.py
   # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
   from __future__ import unicode_literals
   from .base import *

4. Apply the settings that you want to attach or overwrite for your specific environment in the other files, for example, the development environment settings should go to dev.py as shown in the following:

   # myproject/conf/dev.py
   # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
   from __future__ import unicode_literals
   from .base import *
   EMAIL_BACKEND = \
       "django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend"

5. At the beginning of the myproject/settings.py, import the configurations from one of the environment settings and then additionally attach specific or sensitive configurations such as DATABASES or API keys that shouldn't be under version control, as follows:

   # myproject/settings.py
   # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
   from __future__ import unicode_literals
   from .conf.dev import *
   
   DATABASES = {
       "default": {
           "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.mysql",
           "NAME": "myproject",
           "USER": "root",
           "PASSWORD": "root",
       }
   }

6. Create a settings.py.sample file that should contain all the sensitive settings that are necessary for a project to run; however, with empty values set.

How it works…

By default, the Django management commands use the settings from myproject/settings.py. Using the method that is defined in this recipe, we can keep all the required non-sensitive settings for all environments under version control in the conf directory. Whereas, the settings.py file itself would be ignored by version control and will only contain the settings that are necessary for the current development, testing, staging, or production environments.

See also

• The Creating and including local settings recipe
• The Defining relative paths in the settings recipe
• The Setting the Subversion ignore property recipe
• The Creating a Git ignore file recipe