Setting distinction between development and public server

If your code is under source control and you develop locally and then publish that globally, you might need to modify the settings file after each update to ensure the system paths and database settings are correct.

This simple solution helps to distinguish development server from the public server. And you won't need to care about modifying files on the public server anymore.

Create a file called dev_environment.py in your site-packages directory of the development server only (do not put it under source control). Then use the following lines in the beginning of your files, you want to check whether you are in the development environment.

try: 
    from dev_environment import *
except:
    is_dev_environment = False

Then for example, you can set the database settings according the environment:

if is_dev_environment:
    DATABASE_NAME = "test"
    DATABASE_USER = "root"
    DATABASE_PASSWORD = ""
else:
    DATABASE_NAME = "publicproject"
    DATABASE_USER = "projectuser"
    DATABASE_PASSWORD = "ahl3379ljkasd"