Very very glad to hear this. All too frequently in #django, "please show us your settings (and remove any sensitive data)" ends up with a "Now you need to reset your SECRET_KEY" etc.
I wrote django12factor to do something similar. One of the things I like least about it is the process of actually using it from your settings.py - there's things in there I'd love to see in the generated default. Right now it handles most settings individually and only addresses "the most common ones" - a simple boolean handler for DEBUG, string splitting for ALLOWED_HOSTS etc., and outsources CACHES / DATABASES / EMAIL* to django-cache-url, dj-database-url and dj-email-url respectively. This isn't ideal, BUT even without getting into generically useful helpers, I think a lot of those could be useful in the standard template... https://github.com/doismellburning/django12factor/pull/19/files is a branch where I prototyped something similar to your type coercion idea; you may find it more elegant, ymmv - I'd be interested in your thoughts. On Monday, April 11, 2016 at 7:33:54 AM UTC+1, James Bennett 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 > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/django-developers. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/a324953c-95f0-4efa-8e22-993eb48096d1%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
