Loading Django Settings for the Current Git Branch

Before deployment, I test the code and functionality against several separate databases so that local data is preserved while I verify the branch currently used in production.

As usual, the configuration is split into two files: settings.py provides the baseline, and settings_local.py overrides it. The latter is not tracked, so it can be changed freely.

Changing the configuration manually every time I switched branches was tedious. I wanted to load it automatically by detecting the current branch. There are two main Python libraries for working with Git, PyGit2 and GitPython. Their popularity was similar, so after briefly reviewing their documentation, I chose GitPython:

from git import Repo

git_repo_path = '/home/you_git_repo'
repo = Repo(git_repo_path)
if repo.active_branch.name == 'develop':
    conf = conf1
else:
    conf = conf2

You could also run git branch through Python’s os module and parse the output, but that is more cumbersome.

Originally published on SegmentFault.