django-environ is the Python package that allows you to use Twelve-factor methodology to configure your Django application with environment variables.

For that, it gives you an easy way to configure Django application using environment variables obtained from an environment file and provided by the OS:

import environ
import os

env = environ.Env(
    # set casting, default value
    DEBUG=(bool, False)
)

# Set the project base directory
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

# Take environment variables from .env file
environ.Env.read_env(os.path.join(BASE_DIR, '.env'))

# False if not in os.environ because of casting above
DEBUG = env('DEBUG')

# Raises Django's ImproperlyConfigured
# exception if SECRET_KEY not in os.environ
SECRET_KEY = env('SECRET_KEY')

# Parse database connection url strings
# like psql:https://user:[email protected]:8458/db
DATABASES = {
    # read os.environ['DATABASE_URL'] and raises
    # ImproperlyConfigured exception if not found
    #
    # The db() method is an alias for db_url().
    'default': env.db(),

    # read os.environ['SQLITE_URL']
    'extra': env.db_url(
        'SQLITE_URL',
        default='sqlite:https:////tmp/my-tmp-sqlite.db'
    )
}

CACHES = {
    # Read os.environ['CACHE_URL'] and raises
    # ImproperlyConfigured exception if not found.
    #
    # The cache() method is an alias for cache_url().
    'default': env.cache(),

    # read os.environ['REDIS_URL']
    'redis': env.cache_url('REDIS_URL')
}

The idea of this package is to unify a lot of packages that make the same stuff: Take a string from os.environ, parse and cast it to some of useful python typed variables. To do that and to use the 12factor approach, some connection strings are expressed as url, so this package can parse it and return a urllib.parse.ParseResult. These strings from os.environ are loaded from a .env file and filled in os.environ with setdefault method, to avoid to overwrite the real environ. A similar approach is used in Two Scoops of Django book and explained in 12factor-django article.

Using django-environ you can stop to make a lot of unversioned settings_*.py to configure your app. See cookiecutter-django for a concrete example on using with a django project.

Feature Support

• Fast and easy multi environment for deploy
• Fill os.environ with .env file variables
• Variables casting
• Url variables exploded to django specific package settings
• Optional support for Docker-style file based config variables (use environ.FileAwareEnv instead of environ.Env)

django-environ is released under the MIT / X11 License, its documentation lives at Read the Docs, the code on GitHub, and the latest release on PyPI.

It’s rigorously tested on Python 3.5+, and officially supports Django 1.11, 2.2, 3., 3.1, 3.2, 4.0 and 4.1.

If you'd like to contribute to django-environ you're most welcome!

Should you have any question, any remark, or if you find a bug, or if there is something you can't do with the django-environ, please open an issue.