Django does not have a built-in way of having development only settings. Luckily for us, Django settings is nothing but a simple python module. This allows us to implement our own way of dealing with settings right in the settings.py file.

On This Week in Django episode 4 (great podcast!), Michael Trier featured a Tip of the Week on how to implement development only settings. Since I like to have everything checked in to my Mercurial repository, I extended the code to allow local settings to exists on my production server without being loaded.

The original version.

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[..]
try:
    from local_settings import *
except ImportError, exp:
    pass

My version.

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[..]
import socket
if not socket.gethostname() == "omh.cc":
    try:
        from local_settings import *
    except ImportError, exp:
        pass

It’s very simple. All it does is to check the host name and only import local_settings.py if host name is not “omh.cc”, which is the name of my server.