Working on Django projects I find very often that many developers access the values that are defined in settings in this way

1
2
3

from django.conf import settings

my_value = settings.MY_SETTING

What happens if MY_SETTING has not been defined in settings.py? The code will raise an error and crash, of course. How can we make the code more reliable? We could try/except the code block that tries to read the value and maybe set a value if we get an exception, but this would not be a clean way to do this job.

A cleaner way to do it is to use getattr in this way:

1
2
3

from django.conf import settings

my_value = getattr(settings, 'MY_SETTING', 'my-default-value')

getattr will try to read MY_SETTING value from settings.py, if the value doesn’t exist my_value will be assigned with 'my-default-value'