A helper class for handling configuration defaults of packaged Django apps gracefully.
Note
This app precedes Django's own AppConfig classes that act as "objects [to] store metadata for an application" inside Django's app loading mechanism. In other words, they solve a related but different use case than django-appconf and can't easily be used as a replacement. The similarity in name is purely coincidental.
Say you have an app called myapp
with a few defaults, which you want to refer to in the app's code without repeating yourself all the time. appconf
provides a simple class to implement those defaults. Simply add something like the following code somewhere in your app files:
Note
AppConf
classes depend on being imported during startup of the Django process. Even though there are multiple modules loaded automatically, only the models
modules (usually the models.py
file of your app) are guaranteed to be loaded at startup. Therefore it's recommended to put your AppConf
subclass(es) there, too.
The settings are initialized with the capitalized app label of where the setting is located at. E.g. if your models.py
with the AppConf
class is in the myapp
package, the prefix of the settings will be MYAPP
.
You can override the default prefix by specifying a prefix
attribute of an inner Meta
class:
The MyAppConf
class will automatically look at Django's global settings to determine if you've overridden it. For example, adding this to your site's settings.py
would override SETTING_1
of the above MyAppConf
:
Since django-appconf completes Django's global settings with its default values (like "one" above), the standard python manage.py diffsettings
will show these defaults automatically.
In case you want to use a different settings object instead of the default 'django.conf.settings'
, set the holder
attribute of the inner Meta
class to a dotted import path:
If you ship an AppConf
class with your reusable Django app, it's recommended to put it in a conf.py
file of your app package and import django.conf.settings
in it, too:
In the other files of your app you can easily make sure the settings are correctly loaded if you import Django's settings object from that module, e.g. in your app's views.py
: