DEV Community: Krishna Modepalli

Stop Putting Everything in .env — Runtime Config for Django

Krishna Modepalli — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:30:00 +0000

Hello all! 👋

TL;DR I created a runtime configuration Django app called django-sysconfig.

Here's the problem that led me to build it. We all tend to bloat the settings.py and .env files to store all these secrets and other API URLs for 3rd-party integrations. This approach requires the server restart on each change to .env file, and also this is not a scalable solution.

The Solution

django-sysconfig is a schema-driven database-backed typed runtime configuration app for Django. This app has in-built cache support (using Django Cache Framework) with a simple Admin UI to allow non-IT admins to easily manage the project configurations.

Some features of this app:

Validations (email, url, ip, port, hostname, min-max, regex, etc. Each config value will be validated before saving to DB)
A clean Admin UI to manage configurations.
Schema based config. Your schema updates as your app grows and is distributed across your apps instead of a single place)
on_save callbacks for each config (helpful for DevOps notifications)
CLI management command to manage configs through cli.
Runtime typed. The values are automatically converted to the field defined type.
Secrets. Store secrets securely in DB (encrypted) and are decrypted when used in code.

This app is built to be extended from the core. You don't like the admin UI. Make your own the core config API and simple templates. Need new validators or new config Field types? Create your own very easily.

How does it compare?

Feature	django-sysconfig ⭐	django-constance	django-dynamic-preferences
Schema definition	`sysconfig.py` per app, auto-discovered	`CONSTANCE_CONFIG` dict in `settings.py`	Decorated Python class, registered manually
Storage	Database	Redis, Database, or Memory	Database
Caching	✅ No expiry, invalidated on write.	✅ Redis TTL or DB cache backend	✅ Django cache, invalidated on write
Typed fields	✅ String, Int, Decimal, Bool, Select, Textarea, Secret	Basic — custom types via `CONSTANCE_ADDITIONAL_FIELDS`	✅ Bool, String, Int, Float, Choice, File, ModelChoice…
Built-in validators	✅ 20 — email, URL, IP, range, regex, slug, JSON, port…	❌	Basic form field validation only
Encryption at rest	✅ `SecretFrontendModel` (Fernet AES-128 + HMAC)	❌	❌
on_save callback	✅ Per-field, fires after DB write + cache update	❌	❌
Management CLI	✅ `get`, `set`, `reset`, `export`, `import` (with `--dry-run`, `--force`, `--skip-on-save-callbacks`)	❌	❌
Per-user / instance settings	❌ Global only	❌ Global only	✅ Global + per-user/model
Admin UI	Custom staff-only views at `/admin/config/`	Standard Django admin (flat list)	Standard Django admin (grouped by section)
Accessing values	`config.get("app.section.field")`	`config.SETTING_NAME`	`global_preferences["section__name"]`
REST API	❌	❌	✅ Optional, DRF-based
Min Python / Django	Python 3.11 / Django 4.2	Python 3.x / Django 3.2	Python 3.6 / Django 3.2
Maturity	🆕 Early stage	🏆 Mature, Jazzband-maintained	✅ Stable, active community

I've recently released the v1.0.0 to PyPi. Feel free to try it out. Would love your feedback on this.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/krishnamodepalli/django-sysconfig
Docs: https://krishnamodepalli.github.io/django-sysconfig/

Automatically pull, when you enter a git repo (cli)

Krishna Modepalli — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 17:41:12 +0000

We all work with git repositories once we start learning programming and coding. When we use git a lot and starting to get used to it, someday we will encounter the problem of committing new changes locally and pushing when we have some changes to pull, in the first place, which we did forget.

Some IDE's like jetbrains (and vscode maybe) provide you the feature to pull any recent changes to the repository in the remote, Which will save us from this problem. But fate is too harsh on us sometimes, we can do nothing but revert the code and just re-commit our changes.

So I did want to come up with a solution which is simple and easy to set-up. So what I did is, when ever I enter a git repo (local git repo folder), I will run a simple bash script which will ask the user to either pull, fetch or just do nothing.

The script is very simple, please check my github repo for this simple bash automation project.

Currently I am trying to give it a bit more flavour. The bash script is sometimes very annoying, if we frequently move between projects. So I want to implement a time barrier, which checks the last time I opened this project. If it is more than 20 mins, then the script will ask to fetch new changes. Other-wise, the script silently continues to exit.

Setting up a git-server on linux

Krishna Modepalli — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:11:59 +0000

Before starting, Let us know the part of What is a git-server?
A git-server is server where we can host git repositories, for e.g. GitHub & GitLab, etc.. The git platform is a decentralized version control system, which means we have the local copy of the repo, and we can externally host the repo at any place. This increases the usability for the user to even code the project even the server is offline, and can upload the changes once hit online. Setting-Up a private git-server is a good option for a private organizations like companies, or can be a nice project for a college student.

Setting-Up the linux Machine

You can use any flavour of linux distro. Make sure you setup every-thing you need to set a basic server, like Opening the required ports and stuff, accessing your server via SSH or Display. You can do this by the guidance from any developer or just tutorials.

SSH port is must for the git. So make sure to open the 22 port. You can do this with ufw command

$ ufw enable               # To start the ufw
$ ufw allow OpenSSH        # To Open the 22 port
# To check if done 👍?
$ ufw status

You should see an output saying Port 22 is enabled.

Setting-Up the user for handling git server

You need to add a new user named git on your linux machine, make sure that you add that user to sudoers file. After that, you need to access the user git using some ssh keys. For that You need to generate ssh-keys on your local machine and copy the public keys to access your repo via SSH from your private server.

Steps for setting-up a user for git-server

Create a sudo user named git

$ sudo useradd git
$ sudo usermod -aG sudo git
$ su git                # change to git user

Create a .ssh folder & store the public keys for the repositories
```
$ mkdir ~/.ssh
$ touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
```
Generate your ssh-keys on your local machine to access your repo on server. Copy the public key and paste it in this file.
Create the /git/repo-name or /repo-name file in the file-system.
```
$ sudo chown git /git or /repo-name
$ cd /git
$ mkdir test_repo.git
```
By default /git folder belongs to root only. Change the Owner-Ship to git using chown
Initialize the git repository.
```
$ git init --bare
```
Always use the --bare flag, because this makes the repository convenient for pulling from & pushing to. The normal repositories doesn't help pulling or pushing.
Completed
```
$ git clone git@your-server-ip:/git/test_repo.git
```
You can use this repo just like the one cloned from your github account

That's it, your private git-server is ready to server now.

DEV Community: Krishna Modepalli

Stop Putting Everything in .env — Runtime Config for Django

The Solution

How does it compare?

Automatically pull, when you enter a git repo (cli)

Setting up a git-server on linux

Setting-Up the linux Machine

Setting-Up the user for handling git server

Create a sudo user named git

Create a .ssh folder & store the public keys for the repositories

Create the /git/repo-name or /repo-name file in the file-system.

Initialize the git repository.

Completed

Create a `.ssh` folder & store the public keys for the repositories