I am working on a Google Cloud Django Project.
I am trying to check in settings.py if I am running in Development or Production mode.
I added the following block of code to test if the SOFTWARE where the program is running either is on my machine or on Google Cloud Servers.
# | settings.py |
if os.getenv('SERVER_SOFTWARE', '').startswith('Google App Engine'):
#code to execute in production
else:
#code to execute in development
I noticed that the if statment is always false, so I decited to debug the os.environ dict.
The result of the debug is that the value of the key SERVER_SOFTWARE of the enviroment is equal to gunicorn/20.1.0.
As written in the correct answer of this stackoverflow question, when running on production (so on Google Cloud Severs App Engine), the value of SERVER_SOFTWARE should be Google App Engine/X.Y.Z, where X, Y and Z represent the version of Google Cloud. But, as I said, my value, when running on App Engine, is not like that, it is gunicorn/20.1.0.
So, how do I make the program know if I am running either in development or production?
Unfortunately, the Stack Overflow (SO) answer you linked to is almost twelve years old and refers to Python 2 (deprecated). I was unable to find the SYSTEM_SOFTWARE default env. var. for both the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) App Engine Standard (here) and Flexible environment (here).
It's safe to say that the env. var. that App Engine injects into every Standard instance by default can change. Instead, why don't you supply an env. var. in your App Engine Standard env. configuration file (app.yaml) to make sure that your Django application is running in "production" only when you want it to:
Add the env_variables section to app.yaml, such as:
. . .
env_variables:
DJANGO_PRODUCTION_ENVIRONMENT: true
. . .
or:
. . .
env_variables:
DJANGO_SYSTEM_SOFTWARE: "production"
. . .
You can look into more App Engine Standard env. config. settings here.
Deploy your Django application to App Engine Standard env. with the GCP Cloud SDK (gcloud):
gcloud app deploy --appyaml=./app.yaml
Confirm that older versions (e.g., $AES_OLD_VERSION) have stopped with:
gcloud app versions list \
--format="table[box=true](version.id:label=ID, version.servingStatus:label=STATUS)" \
--service=$AES_SERVICE_ID
┌──────────────────┬─────────┐
│ ID │ STATUS │
├──────────────────┼─────────┤
│ . . . │ . . . │
│ $AES_OLD_VERSION │ STOPPED │
│ $AES_VERSION_ID │ SERVING │
└──────────────────┴─────────┘
Confirm that your env. var. have made it into $AES_VERSION_ID with:
gcloud app versions describe $AES_VERSION_ID \
--format="yaml(envVariables)" \
--service=$AES_SERVICE_ID
#=>
envVariables:
DJANGO_PRODUCTION_ENVIRONMENT: 'True'
DJANGO_SYSTEM_SOFTWARE: production
I'll present a couple other solutions.
(1) GAE provided env vars
GAE automatically sets environment variables that you probably don't set when running locally. I use this:
version = os.environ.get('GAE_VERSION', 'local')
You'll get the actual version in production and 'local' on your machine.
(2) Check the request URL
This is Flask but there must be something similar in Django:
request.url_root == 'http://localhost:8080/'