multiple settings.py

[João Dias de Carvalho Neto]

Hi

I'm recently diving into Django framework and a doubt is flashing my head.

If I want to develop and to deploy cloud web applications, each customer will have your singular database. In the Django approach, The database configurations are in the settings.py file. How can I do to separate a settings.py file for each customer, and their unique configurations without create a copy of my entire project?

It's possible to create dinamically a settings.py file at user session or it's better keep those files existing at web root?

Any help will be apreciated?

Thanks in advance

João Dias de Carvalho Neto

[akaariai]

There are probably some applications out there which does this for you.

However, do not try to dynamically change settings in production. That is likely to cause you problems. It might work if you know what you are doing and you are running in single-threaded environment. Then again, it might not.

I suggest you just setup each client to different url in your HTTP server config. Then, each user can have own settings file, containing essentially:
from general_settings import *
DATABASES['default']['name'] = 'users_db_name'
DATABASES['default']['user'] = 'user'
...

I think that is the easiest way. Of course, if you have a lot of different clients who use the service rarely this will not work too well as each of those will need one process. In that case I suggest you create a middleware which does the database rerouting for you.

There are two options for the middleware: you could assign the user's DBWrapper to django.db.connections['default']. This relies on implementation details of Django, and does not work in 1.3. In 1.4 beta this should work. See the source code of django/db for details. Another option is to use threading.local() to store the database alias for the user. Then, when doing queries set .using(db_from_threading_local) for each query. Maybe database routers could also be used for this purpose together with threading.local. I don't know that are too well.

 - Anssi