Remove secret key from settings and change it before deploying to production

[PresidentNick]

I forgot to make a secrets file to store sensitive django settings. We'll need to do make a secrets file and change the secret key before we deploy it anywhere. It's fine for now since we're just running this locally.

[Phaen]

Ideally to deploy it on our server, the secret key would be sourced from the environment. Is there any easy way to do that, with a gitignored secrets file as backup for those that prefer it?

[PresidentNick]

Usually with the settings file there is a base.py settings, a dev.py, and prod.py, and a local.py. They all inherit from base and overwrite settings for the respective environment.

dev.py example:

from .base import *

#all of the dev.py settings here

try:
    from .local import * # overwrite with local settings
except ImportError:
    pass