Settings and Configuration

Settings Hierarchy

SOS Django Template, hence its name (Separation of Settings), separates development and production settings. The setting files are located in project.settings module and structured as below:

• project.settings.defaults module: This module usually contains default settings that are generated with django-admin startproject and some defaults of SOS Django Template. It is not meant to be changed by hand, should be left as it is.
• project.settings.base module: This module contains the settings in both production and development environment. A best point where you can define the settings that should be in both development and production environment.
• project.settings.development module only contains settings for development environment.
• project.settings.production module only contains settings for production environment.

These modules import all from parents (e.g. from .base import *) in a hierarchy shown as below:

defaults
└── base
    ├── development
    └── production

So, base module imports everything in defaults. development imports base and production imports base as well, but not each other.

Usually, when you run python3 manage.py runserver, development module is used because you won't do that in production environment. On the other hand, project.wsgi module uses production module.

.env file

Recommended reading: 12factor Conventions

Utilizing a .env file has become a standard and used in many web frameworks. It helps you migrate your project to many environment with less hassle. .env file itself is just an environment variable file where you can define your environment varibles.

SOS Django Template also has .env.example file and you need to rename it to .env at the beginning of your project. This file is ignored by git and you shouldn't push it to your repository anyway.

SOS Django Template already has predefined variables for you to setup, these can be seen in the table below:

Variable Name	Related Django Settings Variable	Default in File	Default if not defined	Description
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY	SECRET_KEY	-	ERROR	Secret key to encrypt data in database.
DJANGO_DEBUG	DEBUG	true	True	Whether to run Django in debug mode or not.
DJANGO_DB_ENGINE	DATABASES["default"]["ENGINE"]	"django.db.backends.postgresql"	"django.db.backends.sqlite3"	Which database engine to use.
DJANGO_DB_NAME	DATABASES["default"]["NAME"]	"project"	os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "db.sqlite3")	Database name.
DJANGO_DB_USER	DATABASES["default"]["USER"]	"postgres"	"postgres"	Database username.
DJANGO_DB_PASSWORD	DATABASES["default"]["PASSWORD"]	""	""	Database password.
DJANGO_DB_HOST	DATABASES["default"]["HOST"]	"127.0.0.1"	"127.0.0.1"	Database host.
DJANGO_DB_PORT	DATABASES["default"]["PORT"]	5432	5432	Database port.
DJANGO_LANGUAGE_CODE	LANGUAGE_CODE	"en-us"	"en-us"	Default language code.
DJANGO_TIME_ZONE	TIME_ZONE	"UTC"	"UTC"	Default time zone.
DJANGO_USE_I18N	USE_I18N	true	True	Whether to use internalization module of Django.
DJANGO_USE_L10N	USE_L10N	true	True	Whether to use localization module of Django.
DJANGO_USE_TZ	USE_TZ	true	True	Whether to use timezones while storing datetimes in database.
DJANGO_STATIC_URL	STATIC_URL	"/static/"	"/static/"	URL to serve static files.
DJANGO_STATIC_ROOT	STATIC_ROOT	-	django dir under temporary directory in your system in development environment	Where to collect all static files.

Since you don't push your .env file to the repository, while setting up production server, you can just copy your .env file to production server and make some adjustments.

Settings Conventions

If you'd like your settings to be present in development environment, you can edit project.settings.development module, and for the production-specific settings, you can use projects.settings.production module. If you want your settings to be present in both environment, you can edit projects.settings.base module.

While installing and configuring a 3rd-party app, you usually install it first and add it into INSTALLED_APPS variable. While this is a way to do that, (i) it is better to leave project.settings.default as is and (ii) add settings into its own section. Some apps already have been defined in one of those settings module in SOS Django Template. For example, see base module. It has a specific section for Django Rest Framework:

# Rest Framework
INSTALLED_APPS.append("rest_framework")

As you can see, instead of changing project.settings.defaults, I directly append to INSTALLED_APPS array inside of it in project.settings.base module. If I want further customization for Django Rest Framework, it would be better to add it under its section.

# Rest Framework
INSTALLED_APPS.append("rest_framework")
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': [
        'rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer',
    ],
    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': [
        'rest_framework.parsers.JSONParser',
    ]
}

So each time you install an app, it is better to create its own section whether in base, development and/or production module and add it in there.