Tag: JustFile

Categories
Django

Using different .env files

In a Django project I’m working on I use a library called Django-environ which

allows you to utilize 12factor inspired environment variables to configure your Django application.

It’s a pretty sweet library as well. You create a .env file to store your variable that you don’t want in a public repo for your settings.py.

The big issue I have is that my .env file for my local development isn’t what I want on my production server (obviously … never set DEBIG=True in production!)

I had tried to use a different .env file using an assortment of methods, but to no avail. And the documentation wasn’t much of a help for using Multiple env file

It is possible to have multiple env files and select one using environment variables.

Now ENV_PATH=other-env ./manage.py runserver uses other-env while ./manage.py runserver uses .env.

But there’s no example about how to actually set that up 🤦🏻‍♂️1.

In fact, this bit in the documentation reminded me of thisvideo on YouTube.

Instead of trying to figure out the use of multiple .env files I instead used a just recipe in my justfile to get the job done. 

# checks the deployment for prod settings; will return error if the check doesn't pass
check:
    cp core/.env core/.env_staging
    cp core/.env_prod core/.env
    -python manage.py check --deploy
    cp core/.env_staging core/.env

OK. What does this recipe do?

First, we copy the development .env file to a .env_staging file to keep the original development settings ‘somewhere’

 cp core/.env core/.env_staging

Next, we copy the .env_prod to the .env so that we can use it when we run -python manage.py check --deploy. 

cp core/.env_prod core/.env
-python manage.py check --deploy

Why do we use the -? That allows the justfile to keep going if it runs into an error. Since we’re updating our main .env file I want to make sure it gets restored to its original state … just in case!

Finally, we copy the original contents of the .env file from the .env_staging back to the .env to restore it to its development settings.

Now, I can simply run 

just check

And I’ll know if I have passed the 12 factor checking for my Django project or somehow introduced something that makes the check not pass.

I’d like to figure out how to set up multiple .env files, create an example and contribute to the docs … but honestly I have no freaking clue how to do it. If I am able to figure it out, you can bet I’m going to write up a PR for the docs!

  1. I’d like to figure out how to set up multiple .env files, create an example and contribute to the docs … but honestly I have no freaking clue how to do it. If I am able to figure it out, you can bet I’m going to write up a PR for the docs! ↩