Transferring django settings to Environment Variables

Question

I set the django project settings and added values to environment variables at my local ubuntu mashine and AWS Ubuntu server using .bashrc file at the root folder.

...
export DEBUG="True"
...

settings.py

...
SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get('SECRET_KEY')
DEBUG = os.environ.get('DEBUG', False)
...

At local all working good, but at production server values are not importing. Why doesn't it work on both machines? How do I set up production?

Im running production server using asgi server daphne, accordingly this tutorial

upd

asgi.py

import os
import django
from channels.routing import get_default_application

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "myapp.settings")
django.setup()
application = get_default_application()

Answer 1

So, what I usually do is: I have a script which runs when Django is setup and creates a .env file with some values.

project_setup.py

import os
import random
import string


def write_dot_env_file(env_file):
    settings = get_settings()
    with open(env_file, 'w') as f:
        for k, v in settings.items():
            f.write(f'{k.upper()}={v}\n')


def get_settings():
    return {
        'SECRET_KEY': generate_secret_key(),
        'DEBUG': True,
        'ALLOWED_HOSTS': '*',
    }


def generate_secret_key():
    specials = '!@#$%^&*(-_=+)'
    chars = string.ascii_lowercase + string.digits + specials
    return ''.join(random.choice(chars) for _ in range(50))


def main():
    env_file = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)), '.env')

    if not os.path.isfile(env_file):
        write_dot_env_file(env_file)
    else:
        pass


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Then on my manage.py and wsgi.py just before Django setting the path of the settings you do:

manage.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
from project_setup import main as project_setup_main

if __name__ == '__main__':
    project_setup_main()
    os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'yoursettings')
    ...

And that's it. When Django runs it'll create a .env file for you with the minimum requirements. Or you can just create the function generate_secret_key inside your settings.py and use it as a default for your SECRET_KEY declaration, like: SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get('SECRET_KEY', get_secret_key())