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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