Although I wasn’t able to come across anything Python-specific on stackoverflow, I did find a website that was helpful, and thought I’d share the solution with the rest of the community.
The solution: environment variables.
Note: Although environment variables are similar in both Linux/Unix/OS X and in the Windows worlds, I haven’t tested this code on a Windows machine. Please let me know if it works.
In your bash/sh shell, type:
export MYAPP_DB_USER='myapp'
export MYAPP_DB_PASSWORD='testing123'
And in your Django settings.py file:
DATABASE_USER = os.environ.get("MYAPP_DB_USER", '')
DATABASE_PASSWORD = os.environ.get("MYAPP_DB_PASSWORD", '')
In this case, the username and password would default to an empty string if the environment variable didn’t exist.