Cannot use environment variables for settings in Django

Question

In trying to find a place to store and save settings beyond settings.py and the database, I used an environment.json for environment variables. I import these in settings.py.

Answer 1

I see the question changed slightly, the original answers are still below but this one has a slightly different answer:

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First, make sure you are using the right settings.py (print 'This file is being loaded' should do the trick).

Second, personally I would advise against using json files for config since it is less dynamic than Python files, but it should work regardless.

My recommended way of doing something like this:

1. create a base_settings.py file with your standard settings
2. create a settings.py which will be your default settings import. This file should have a from base_settings import * at the top to inherit the base settings.
3. If you want to have a custom settings file, dotcloud_settings.py for example, simply add the from dotcloud_settings import settings (or base_settings) and set the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to dotcloud_settings or your_project.dotcloud_settings depending on your setup.

Do note that you should be very careful with importing Django modules from these settings files. If any module does a from django.conf import settings it will stop parsing your settings after that point.

As for using json files, roughly the same principle of course:

• Once again, make sure you don't have anything that imports django.conf.settings here

• Make all of the variables within your json file global to your settings file:

  import json with open('/home/dotcloud/environment.json') as f: env = json.load(f) # A little hack to make all variables within our env global globals().update(env)

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Regardless though, I'd recommend turning this around and letting the settings file import this module instead.

Also, Django doesn't listen to environment variables by default (besides the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE so that might be the problem too.