Django Decouple: Strict separation of settings from code

Decouple helps you to organize your settings so that you can change parameters without having to redeploy your app.

Why?

Django's settings stores many different kind of parameters:

• Locale and i18n
• Middlewares and Installed Apps
• Resource handles to the database, Memcached, and other backing services
• Credentials to external services such as Amazon S3 or Twitter
• Per-deploy values such as the canonical hostname for the deploy

The first 2 items are project settings the last 3 are instance settings.

You should be able to change instance settings without redeploying your app.

Install

pip install django-decouple

Usage

Use it on your settings.py.

1. Import the Config class:

from decouple import Config

1. Instantiate it passing the config storage:

config = Config('settings.ini')

1. Retrieve the configuration parameters:

SECRET_KEY = config('SECRET_KEY')
DEBUG = config('DEBUG', default=False, cast=bool)
EMAIL_HOST = config('EMAIL_HOST', default='localhost')
EMAIL_PORT = config('EMAIL_PORT', default=25, cast=int)

How I use it

Bellow there is a snippet of a settings.py.

I also recommend using unipath and dj-datatabase-url.

# coding: utf-8
from unipath import Path
from decouple import Config
from dj_database_url import db_url


PROJECT_ROOT = Path(__file__).parent

config = Config(PROJECT_ROOT.child('settings.ini'))

DEBUG = config('DEBUG', default=False, cast=bool)
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

DATABASES = {
    'default': config(
        'DATABASE_URL',
        default='sqlite:///' + PROJECT_ROOT.child('database.db'),
        cast=db_url
    )
}

SITE_ID = 1

TIME_ZONE = 'America/Sao_Paulo'
USE_L10N = True
USE_TZ = True

SECRET_KEY = config('SECRET_KEY')

EMAIL_HOST = config('EMAIL_HOST', default='localhost')
EMAIL_PORT = config('EMAIL_PORT', default=25, cast=int)
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = config('EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD')
EMAIL_HOST_USER = config('EMAIL_HOST_USER')
EMAIL_USE_TLS = config('EMAIL_USE_TLS', default=False, cast=bool)

# ...

License

The MIT License.