Daily Dev Notes 2024/05/25

I took the plunge today and finally ripped out djpress into its own, stand-alone package. I mostly followed this guide from Django, which linked through to a tutorial on the Python Packaging site which explained how to build and upload it.

After following the steps, I managed to get the package deployed to PyPi, and created a new public repository to host the code!

• DJ Press on PyPi
• DJ Press on GitHub

Of course, as soon as I had uploaded it, I realised there was a fundamental error with the code, in that it relied on configuration settings that only existed in my stuartm.nz codebase. So I had to refactor that so that the default settings are in the package, and then I can over-ride them in my project settings file.

I got ChatGPT to help with this, and was pretty happy with the result. I created a new app_settings.py file that holds all the configuration settings. And then created a conf.py file that loads the default project settings or the app settings if they don't exist.

"""Configuration settings for DJ Press"""

from django.conf import settings as django_settings

from . import app_settings as default_settings


class Settings:
    def __init__(self, default_settings_module, user_settings_module):
        self._default_settings = default_settings_module
        self._user_settings = user_settings_module

    def __getattr__(self, name):
        # If the setting is found in the user settings, return it
        if hasattr(self._user_settings, name):
            return getattr(self._user_settings, name)
        # If the setting is found in the default settings, return it
        if hasattr(self._default_settings, name):
            return getattr(self._default_settings, name)
        # If the setting is not found in either, raise an AttributeError
        raise AttributeError(f"Setting '{name}' not found")


settings = Settings(default_settings, django_settings)

And then any time I want to access settings, instead of using: from django.conf import settings, I just use: from djpress.conf import settings. Nothing else in the code needs to change.