CamGeeker

standing problem in Django for a while now. It’s not one that can be fixed by a change to Django itself—in fact, Django is incredibly flexible when it comes to specifying settings, which has given developers room to experiment with a range of solutions. I think I’ve found one which works pretty well.

Begin by breaking your settings into two groups: common settings, anddeployment-specific settings. Common settings are defined in asettings.common sub-module, and may include:

• Defaults for settings like DEBUG, ADMINS, MANAGERS andCACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS. If not subsequently overridden, the values specified here will be used, so they should provide sensible defaults.

• App installation and setup: INSTALLED_APPS, MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES,ROOT_URLCONF and TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS all fall under this category.

• A basic logging setup. It’s good to define, but not install, several handlers—these can optionally be added to the root logger in the deployment-specific configuration. For example, in my common settings, I always do: