django settings per application – best practice?

by

The simplest solution is to use the getattr(settings, 'MY_SETTING', 'my_default') trick that you mention youself. It can become a bit tedious to have to do this in multiple places, though.

Extra recommendation: use a per-app prefix like MYAPP_MY_SETTING.

There is a django app, however, that gets rid of the getattr and that handles the prefix for you. See http://django-appconf.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Normally you create a conf.py per app with contents like this:

from django.conf import settings
from appconf import AppConf

class MyAppConf(AppConf):
    SETTING_1 = "one"
    SETTING_2 = (
        "two",
    )

And in your code: 

from myapp.conf import settings

def my_view(request):
    return settings.MYAPP_SETTINGS_1  # Note the handy prefix

Should you need to customize the setting in your site, a regular entry in your site’s settings.py is all you need to do:

MYAPP_SETTINGS_1 = "four, four I say"

Leave a Comment