Hi James,
>From the experience on our projects, the ``CONFIG.getstr('db.password')``
>format works well in settings files:
- It makes it clear that this field is loaded from the environment, and what
type is expected
- The setting is set and loaded in the same place
- It allows for type checking
- It handles loading other values
This is easier than automagically altering settings based on environment
variables, as the user might set a value in
some part of its settings file, yet find it overridden by some later
declaration of ``ENV_SETTINGS``.
In my opinion, a few important questions to address would be:
- What is the format of those environment variables? For instance, using a
'DJANGO_' prefix will avoid name conflicts
- Can developers use this "environment configuration parser" tool to parse
extra, custom settings; or are we limited to
Django's needs?
- Should we only support "loading from the environment", or is it useful to
allow loading from a ini-style file
(typically to override some values on a local development environment)?
We wrote a small helper to load configuration from various sources (environment
and configuration files); this could be
helpful for designing this new feature:
http://getconf.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
Feel free to ping me if you're interested in more feedback from building and
using that kind of setup :)
On Sun, 10 Apr 2016 23:33:46 -0700
James Bennett <ubernost...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apologies for how late in the process this is; job hunt + moving
> cross-country ate a lot of my time.
>
> At Django Under the Hood I proposed that for Django 1.10 we try to find
> some common best practices for deploying Django on popular
> platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and building support for them into
> Django. The biggest one of these is probably having the ability to read
> configuration from environment variables instead of hard-coding things into
> settings files.
>
> At the very least I'd like to propose (assuming Kenneth is on board with
> it) integrating dj-database-url[1] or something like it directly into
> Django, so that there's no longer a third-party dependency for reading the
> database configuration from an environment variable. Whether this is just
> porting dj-database-url itself in, or making the DATABASES setting
> understand URLs, I'm unsure of yet and would be interested to hear feedback
> on. Either way I'm willing to put in the time to develop the patch.
>
> More generally, I'd like to see Django grow helpers for specifying settings
> that should be read from environment variables, and which environment
> variables to use (the email settings are another common case, as is
> anything that requires an API key to access).
>
> There are a few ways to design this. One option would be just a minimal
> wrapper around os.getenv, perhaps taking an optional type or type-coercing
> function, so that it would be possible in a settings file to do:
>
> SECRET_NUMBER_SETTING = env_setting('SECRET_NUMBER', int)
>
> However, this is not much better than the current practice of calling
> os.getenv. A better solution might be the ability to specify a group of
> settings which will be read from the environment, and have Django
> automatically read and set them. For example:
>
> ENV_SETTINGS = [
> ('SECRET_NUMBER_SETTING', int),
> ('ACME_API_KEY', str),
> ('VOLCANO_LAIR_PASSWORD', str),
> ]
>
> would read the named settings from those environment variables, and coerce
> them to the appropriate types using the function provided.
>
> The main problem with this is that it's really not very elegant. But at the
> moment I can't think of anything better, and so I'd like to throw the floor
> open to ideas on nicer approaches to this. If one can't be found, I do
> think Django 1.10 should at least figure out how to handle database config
> from env since that's such a common use case nowadays, but ideally we'd be
> able to pin down a good API for generically pulling configuration from the
> environment.
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/kennethreitz/dj-database-url
>
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