It's an interesting idea, and I'm not opposed to it myself; however, keeping the settings as Python code is not an abnormal practice compared to other software.
I've been working with some Drupal stuff lately, and it is written in PHP. Drupal is a content management system that can be extended with various modules written in PHP. It's settings file is also just a code file of PHP. Drupal does take advantage of a package manger called composer, which would be similar to our pipenv. Both of those managers use JSON files for their appropriate settings. But package managers are not frameworks. Perhaps we could set up a hybrid in which we have a declarative settings file that can be utilized by a coded settings file, but I feel that might make the whole system a bit too complex to maintain. Just my thoughts. -----Original Message----- From: django-developers@googlegroups.com [mailto:django-developers@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Christian González Sent: Monday, December 30, 2019 4:46 PM To: django-developers Subject: declarative settings Hello, I recently "finished" my first really working version of GDAPS, my Generic Django Application Plugin System. It's noway perfect, but does what it should: providing pluggable apps for an app framework, including a more or less flexible frontend with each django app. I had much struggle with it, and one of the lessons I learned was Django's setup system, and how it deals with loading apps. Unfortunately Django can't load/unload apps on the fly, so it is necessary to restart Django whenever a new GDAPS app is installed via pip. But: I want to resurrect an old theme again which would, in a way, improve some of the loading problems I encountered. Django's settings are code. Which is, in fact, a very good thing, as it makes it extremely flexible and adaptable to different setups. But, as discussed with the SECRET_KEY here, some of the settings _have_ to be coded very complicated, and it makes some things like per-app-settings extremely uncomfortable. What if - and please don't kill me instantly - yes, I am a newcomer, and not a good programmer maybe - but some things are viewed better from "outside" - what if Django settings could be "declarative"? So instead of Python code like INSTALLED_APPS = [ 'django.contrib.admin', 'django.contrib.auth', 'django.contrib.contenttypes' ] This would be in an e.g. JSON file { "INSTALLED_APPS": [ "django.contrib.admin", "django.contrib.auth", "django.contrib.contenttypes" ] , ROOT_URLCONF: "fooproject.urls" } Django's settings.py would look different: It would load that settings.json file and set the appropriate values into local code - so this wouldn't make much difference. Except 2 things: 1. Apps could have (default) settings, and they could be merged MUCH easier. Things like namespaced classes that are overwriting values like DRF/graphene does, would be completely unnecessary. The main settings.json file could be the "last word" in the process of settings, so anything an app would suggest could be overrided in the main file. 2. Installed apps could be managed much more comfortable. Adding an app could be done by a script (JSON editing is easy. Editing code (=settings.py) is error prone and uncomfortable). I have a Django command script ATM for that, but just because I add a line into settings.py to add some additional apps to the list. This even could be done with backwards compatibility, because Django would keep it's settings.py file optionally: * read json settings (if they exist), use them * load settings.py which allows to override them again (using some special code tricks like dynamic loading, environments etc.) Please tell me what you think about that. Christian -- Dr. Christian González https://nerdocs.at -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/3047a7b6-3fa0-d574-4bb6-7842b7aed44a%40nerdocs.at. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/8ea6a5cda5f64ff6babaaf3e42fa9629%40iss2.ISS.LOCAL.
