Usage patterns

There are various configuration patterns that can be implemented with django-configurations. The most common pattern is to have a base class and various subclasses based on the enviroment they are supposed to be used in, e.g. in production, staging and development.

Server specific settings

For example, imagine you have a base setting class in your settings.py file:

from configurations import Configuration

class Base(Configuration):
    TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Berlin'

class Dev(Base):
    DEBUG = True

class Prod(Base):
    TIME_ZONE = 'America/New_York'

You can now set the DJANGO_CONFIGURATION environment variable to one of the class names you’ve defined, e.g. on your production server it should be Prod. In Bash that would be:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings
export DJANGO_CONFIGURATION=Prod
python manage.py runserver

Alternatively you can use the --configuration option when using Django management commands along the lines of Django’s default --settings command line option, e.g.

python manage.py runserver --settings=mysite.settings --configuration=Prod

Property settings

Use a property to allow for computed settings. This pattern can also be used to postpone / lazy evaluate a value. E.g., useful when nesting a Value in a dictionary and a string is required:

class Prod(Configuration):
    SOME_VALUE = values.Value(None, environ_prefix=None)

    @property
    def SOME_CONFIG(self):
        return {
            'some_key': self.SOME_VALUE,
        }

Global settings defaults

Every configurations.Configuration subclass will automatically contain Django’s global settings as class attributes, so you can refer to them when setting other values, e.g.

from configurations import Configuration

class Prod(Configuration):
    TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = Configuration.TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS + (
            'django.core.context_processors.request',
        )

    @property
    def LANGUAGES(self):
        return list(Configuration.LANGUAGES) + [('tlh', 'Klingon')]

Configuration mixins

You might want to apply some configuration values for each and every project you’re working on without having to repeat yourself. Just define a few mixin you re-use multiple times:

class FullPageCaching:
    USE_ETAGS = True

Then import that mixin class in your site settings module and use it with a Configuration class:

from configurations import Configuration

class Prod(FullPageCaching, Configuration):
    DEBUG = False
    # ...

Pristine methods

New in version 0.3.

In case one of your settings itself need to be a callable, you need to tell that django-configurations by using the pristinemethod decorator, e.g.

from configurations import Configuration, pristinemethod

class Prod(Configuration):

    @pristinemethod
    def ACCESS_FUNCTION(user):
        return user.is_staff

Lambdas work, too:

from configurations import Configuration, pristinemethod

class Prod(Configuration):
    ACCESS_FUNCTION = pristinemethod(lambda user: user.is_staff)

Setup methods

New in version 0.3.

If there is something required to be set up before, during or after the settings loading happens, please override the pre_setup, setup or post_setup class methods like so (don’t forget to apply the Python @classmethod decorator):

import logging
from configurations import Configuration

class Prod(Configuration):
    # ...

    @classmethod
    def pre_setup(cls):
        super(Prod, cls).pre_setup()
        if something.completely.different():
            cls.DEBUG = True

    @classmethod
    def setup(cls):
        super(Prod, cls).setup()
        logging.info('production settings loaded: %s', cls)

    @classmethod
    def post_setup(cls):
        super(Prod, cls).post_setup()
        logging.debug("done setting up! \o/")

As you can see above the pre_setup method can also be used to programmatically change a class attribute of the settings class and it will be taken into account when doing the rest of the settings setup. Of course that won’t work for post_setup since that’s when the settings setup is already done.

In fact you can easily do something unrelated to settings, like connecting to a database:

from configurations import Configuration

class Prod(Configuration):
    # ...

    @classmethod
    def post_setup(cls):
        import mango
        mango.connect('enterprise')

Warning

You could do the same by overriding the __init__ method of your settings class but this may cause hard to debug errors because at the time the __init__ method is called (during Django startup) the Django setting system isn’t fully loaded yet.

So anything you do in __init__ that may require django.conf.settings or Django models there is a good chance it won’t work. Use the post_setup method for that instead.

Changed in version 0.4: A new setup method was added to be able to handle the new Value classes and allow an in-between modification of the configuration values.

Standalone scripts

If you want to run scripts outside of your project you need to add these lines on top of your file:

import configurations
configurations.setup()