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Django Settings in Dev and Production: Why the hoops?

Posted on August 17, 2009 by bkjones

So, I’ve taken a break from active development on my project to take a step back and really get a good development workflow together. I’ve been fighting with various components of my development workflow, and in the end decided to compromise: I won’t have something that looks exactly like production, but I’ll have something that works and is easy to use. I’ll make up for it by having a staging environment on the same host as the production deployment, which will catch any differences between dev and production that result from my non-identical setup on my laptop.

In getting things going, one thing I ran into immediately was that things on my dev box are different from production: database credentials, paths to media, etc., and since I’m not using Apache and a reverse proxy some of the paths in settings.py will also be different. So what to do?

Turns out there’s an entire page on the Django wiki detailing the ways in which people keep their dev and production settings from trampling each other. There are also various blog posts where people have come up with interesting ways to make things work properly, usually by taking advantage of the fact that your app’s settings are just python code. As such, you can perform any valid Python wizardry you want to make the right things happen.

I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with doing all of that stuff, but what I’m wondering is this: why not just tell your version control system of choice to *ignore* your settings.py file? This way, you can have a settings.py file on your dev box that works perfectly for your dev environment, and a separate one in production that works perfectly for that environment. Never the twain shall meet.

If you’re using one of the methods described on the Django site or any of the blog posts, what are you getting out of it that couldn’t be accomplished by ignoring settings.py? It just seems like it’s simpler and cleaner to do it that way, but I assume there’s some benefit to jumping through these hoops that I’m missing.

Input is hereby solicited. Please tweet/link/post this wherever, ‘cos I’d like some opinions on the matter.

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