Local setting for INSTALLED_APPS using Fabric

I think the standard approach you mentioned is best; create a folder settings with three settings files; shared.py, production.py and development.py. Settings that are common to all instances of your app are placed in shared.py and this is imported from production.py and development.py. Then you can easily only add compressor in your development settings

shared.py

INSTALLED_APPS = (...)

development.py

from settings.shared import *INSTALLED_APPS += ('compressor',)

You need to make sure then when developing, you run the development server with the development.py settings file:

python manage.py --settings=settings.development 

and similarly on your production server you do the same for production.py (this is down to your implementation)

This is a much better approach in the long term as you can also specify separate cache, database, search etc. settings too.

As an aside, instead of completely removing compressor from your installed apps, you can simply enable and disable is using it's COMPRESS_ENABLED setting

You can also do it in another way.

All the shared settings are in settings.py and keep the difference in local_settings. In your case it is INSTALLED_APPS, you can change your import section to something like this:

DEV_APPS = Nonetry:    from local_settings import *    INSTALLED_APPS += DEV_APPSexcept:    PASS

And here is your local_settings.py:

DEV_APPS = ('compressor',)

My approach is to rename the original settings.py (made by ./manage.py startproject) into base_settings.py. This way all the baseline settings are in base_settings.py.

I will then create a new settings.py file that will only contain the needed environment-specific modifications and overrides from base_settings.py.

So, to answer your question using my approach, my settings.py will be like this:

from .base_settings import *INSTALLED_APPS += ('compressor',)

Any necessary environment-specific setting will then be added in settings.py.

With this approach, I don't need to specify the --settings parameter when calling ./manage.py or to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE.

Makes managing different environments much easier for me.

Note: I use git and I add settings.py to .gitignore for this approach.