I added a SECRET_KEY config variable to my Django app on Heroku but now it won't work locally

Question

I changed my secret key to an environment variable on my Heroku app. I changed it because I found out that keeping the secret key in settings.py was a security

Answer 1

You can export your secret key as an environment variable locally.

export SECRET_KEY=mysecretkey
./manage.py runserver

Or you could change your settings.py to use a hardcoded secret key in DEBUG mode. If you do this, make sure you are running with DEBUG = False on Heroku.

import os

if DEBUG:
    SECRET_KEY = 'mysecretkey'
else:
    SECRET_KEY = os.environ['SECRET_KEY']