django-environ VS djangox

This Django Starter kit takes care of automated creation of virtual environment and installing of Python packages and setting up the database with bash scripts. In addition to PostgreSQL and TailwindCSS, all the sensitive values are taken care of in a .env file using django-environ package. The virtual environment is maintained using pip-tools.

I used to do this but recently switched to using environment variables and now prefer this approach. Essentially you keep the single settings.py file that is generated with startproject, and use os.environ or os.getenv to set certain settings. Check out the FeedHQ settings.py for an example. I use direnv to automatically set my environment variables on my local machine, but django-environ is a popular alternative.

Here i decided to use django-environ's env.db() for the DATABASE_URL.

You might want to use django-environ package for this issue. Create a .env file in the project folder and follow these steps.

For this i use django-environ. Here are a few basic settings:

You could also use just django-environ package to both import config from .env and set a database url instead of using 2 dependencies. I also think of a couple things I could add to the list, maybe I should a write a blog post as well?

You can use django-environ

Docker does not do any quote parsing. For this same env file, it will set the value of the variable to `"foo"` (retaining the doublequotes in the value).

Bash, of course, requires quotes if the variable contains any special bash characters (for example, literal JSON with curly brackets), but its quote handling is much more complex. django-environ doesn't interpret bash code; it just does simple quote chomping.

There's no reliable .env syntax you can use that works in all 3 of django-environ, Docker, and bash; and any variable that should start and end with quotes that are not stripped off can't be expressed in a way that both Docker and django-environ will read in the same way.

This may seem like a nit-picking edge case, but it's indicative of the design philosophy in django-environ of trying to be "helpful", but in ways which lead to subtle confusion. The way it guesses the path to your `.env` file is another example.

[1] https://github.com/joke2k/django-environ/blob/main/environ/e...

For Django use useful environ-wrapper: django-environ

There are very useful packages for bootstrapping your Django projects in minutes such as django-cookiecutter and djangox. If you are a seasoned developer I'd highly recommend using one of these instead of what I'm going to show here. But if you are struggling with the project structure of these packages as a beginner to intermediate Django developer and looking to structure your own Django projects in a better way, I have created a lightweight setup that deals with the basics of setting up a Django project with PostgreSQL as database and TailwindCSS as our styling library.

Pick a proper starter template. You can try https://github.com/wsvincent/djangox or https://speedpy.com and spin up a dev/staging environment with https://appliku.com.

repo link: https://github.com/wsvincent/djangox