In continuation with my previous post on simple Django tips, here is another one. In fact, it's not a tip, it's a mandatory practice that needs to be followed in any Django project.

In any project, many properties should not be visible evidently for security reasons. They should not be checked in code repos either. A few common examples in a Django project are database details, the secret key of a project, email settings, cloud storage details, caching details, ALLOWED_HOSTS, DEBUG and any third-party API keys one may use.

A common approach to handle these is to maintain a .env file, load the property file using loaddotenv and fetch the property using os.environ.get

Let's look at the steps to implement this approach. To not repeat myself, I suggest following steps 1 through 4 from my previous post.

Step 1: Install python-dotenv

Per the pypi definition, python-dotenv reads key-value pairs from a .env file and use them to set as environment variables.

pip install python-dotenv

Step 2: Create a .env file

At the root level of your project (where manage.py resides), create a .env file.

Step 3: Add entries to .env file

Properties that are not to be made visible and kept secure should be added to the .env file. To start with, let's just add SECRET_KEY and DEBUG

SECRET_KEY=<your django project''s secret key>
DEBUG=True

Step 4: Import and load dotenv files in base.py

Once the required properties are set in the .env file, let's move on to making use of them. Navigate to base.py and add the following statements

from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()

Step 5: Fetch properties from .env using os package

Now that the environment variables are loaded from the file, we can invoke them using the usual os package like so 👇

# SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret!
SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get("SECRET_KEY")

# SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
DEBUG = os.environ.get("DEBUG") == "True"

In case of DEBUG we require a boolean value. Since os.environ.get always returns a string value, we add the check of == "True". Otherwise, it will always be true irrespective of the actual value set in the .env file.

Step 6: Add .env file to .gitignore

This is a very important step. Do not forget to add .env file to your .gitignore. Otherwise, it will be added to your code repository thus defeating the whole purpose of keeping things secret.

Conclusion

As the title of the post says, this is a simple tip and hence a short post. Though short, make sure to incorporate this step whenever you build a Django project.