Some notes on handling Development and Production Servers with Django.

How to find out if we are on development or production?

The first thing I do is to define a variable “DEVELOPMENT_MODE“ in settings.py, that checks if the server is running on my local machine or not. I found this nice idea on the djangoproject.com website: http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/djangoproject.com/django_website/settings.py

import os, platform

DEVELOPMENT_MODE = (platform.node() != "my_hostname")

Set the hostname, you can find it out with the command

hostname

in your terminal.
Now on your local machine DEVELOPMENT_MODE variable is True, on production should be False.

settings

With this variable you can split your settings for production and development. This makes sense for the settings like DATABASE_*, DEBUG, MEDIA_*, CACHE_BACKEND and others none django-related-stuff like google-API keys.

An example of my settings.py:

if DEVELOPMENT_MODE:
    DEBUG = True
    DATABASE_ENGINE = 'postgresql_psycopg2'
    DATABASE_NAME = 'xxx'
    DATABASE_USER = 'xxx'
    DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'xxx'
    DATABASE_HOST = 'localhost'
    TEMPLATE_DIRS = ('/xxx/templates')
    MEDIA_ROOT = '/xxx/media/'
    MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
    GOOGLE_KEY = "ABQIAAAA2OXrNyQ" #localhost
    CACHE_BACKEND = 'dummy:///'
else:
    DEBUG = False
    DATABASE_ENGINE = 'postgresql_psycopg2'
    DATABASE_NAME = 'xxx'
    DATABASE_USER = 'xxx'
    DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'xxx'
    DATABASE_HOST = ''
    TEMPLATE_DIRS = ('/xxx/templates',)
    MEDIA_ROOT = '/var/www/server/media/'
    MEDIA_URL = 'http://server/media/'
    GOOGLE_KEY = "ABQIA66g" #domain
    CACHE_BACKEND = 'file:///var/tmp/django_cache'

DATABASE_PORT = ''
...

serve static files

I had a long time on my local machine an apache2 for serving static/media files running. I changed this setting now to ‘django.views.static.serve’ which is the build-in fileserver from django. The reason was that I didn’t want to configure on every webdesigners machine the apache2, only for serving the media.
With the DEVELOPMENT_MODE variable it’s easy to do that. Only append this to the urls.py.

from settings import DEVELOPMENT_MODE

if DEVELOPMENT_MODE:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        url(r'^media/(?P.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': "/media/"}),
    )

The ‘django.views.static.serve’ works very well for development, but never ever use it on production!

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/static_files/

caching

When you use a cache framework, I’m sure you want it only on your production site, so you can use on your local machine the dummy cache that doesn’t actually cache.

if DEVELOPMENT_MODE:
    CACHE_BACKEND = 'dummy:///'
...

http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/cache/#dummy-caching-for-development

database

I’m using PostgreSQL now on development and production site. I found it hard to import/export dumps (structure/data) from Sqlite to PostgreSQL and vice versa. I worked a lot with MySQL and have the most experience with it, but with Django it really sucks sometimes, no fixtures support and no transactions.

Ok that’s it I hope you enjoy reading and please give me some of your tips.