There are some great debugging apps, like the django-debug-toolbar and django-command-extensions, that help out immensely while developing your next killer Django site. There’s a small catch to using them though, which is that they have to be added to INSTALLED_APPS. No big deal, but you don’t really want these installed and running in a production install.

Again, no big deal. It’s an old trick now to maintain a separate local_settings.py file. By importing our local_settings at the end of the settings.py module, anything in local_settings will overwrite whatever is in settings.

So all we have to do then is make a new list of debugging apps in local_settings.py, and add them to the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py.

My first naive attempt was to do this:

# local_settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS +=  ('django_extensions',)

Can you spot the problem? The original INSTALLED_APPS is not available in local_settings.py, so we can’t add to it there.

Well, if we can’t add our list in local_settings.py, let’s add in in settings.py

# local_settings.py
DEBUG_APPS = ('django_extensions',)

# settings.py
try:
    from local_settings.py import *
    INSTALLED_APPS += DEBUG_APPS
except ImportError:
    pass

This works just fine, as long as there is a DEBUG_APPS list specified in local_settings.py. However, the whole point of having a local_settings.py file is to optionally add or overwrite settings.

To remove this dependency, More >