Providing default settings for Django applications

2010-05-11T00:00:00Z

The problem is a simple one: you’re writing a Django application that needs a setting or two. You know what they’ll be in the vast majority of cases but you want to make them configurable, just in case. As you’re a good developer you live by the maxim: Don’t Repeat Yourself so you’d like to define each of these values and, for ease of documentation, all of them in one place. Alas, you’re out of luck: Django does not provide any support for applications to supply their own default values for settings. Thankfully though, all it takes is a few lines of code and your application can shoehorn its own default values into the global settings system.

First, a proviso to what follows: I am almost certain that this is a bad idea and that you should do it. At the very least, you should make sure that your setting names don’t clash (I like to prefix them with the app name).

The goal is simple: your app should contain a settings module which defines the default values for your application’s settings. These values should be injected into Django’s settings system so that manage.py diffsettings and similar functionality all work as you’d expect.

The approach is just as simple: add some code to the top-level module of your application that loops over the values in your app.settings module and inject them into the django.conf.global_settings module and (because it’s already been initialised by the time apps are loaded) the django.conf.settings object (being careful not to stop on actual configured with your default values).

The code itself is pretty simple. From app/__init__.py:

def inject_app_defaults(application):
	"""Inject an application's default settings"""
	try:
		__import__('%s.settings' % application)
		import sys
		
		# Import our defaults, project defaults, and project settings
		_app_settings = sys.modules['%s.settings' % application]
		_def_settings = sys.modules['django.conf.global_settings']
		_settings = sys.modules['django.conf'].settings

		# Add the values from the application.settings module
		for _k in dir(_app_settings):
			if _k.isupper():
				# Add the value to the default settings module
				setattr(_def_settings, _k, getattr(_app_settings, _k))
				
				# Add the value to the settings, if not already present
				if not hasattr(_settings, _k):
					setattr(_settings, _k, getattr(_app_settings, _k))
	except ImportError:
		# Silently skip failing settings modules
		pass

inject_app_defaults(__name__)

You can see the code in a proof of concept application in my django-application-settings project on GitHub.

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Providing default settings for Django applications