Configuration

Section author: Matt Windsor<matt.windsor@ury.org.uk>

LASS uses the Django configuration system, but in a slightly customised manner using YAML files for most of the configuration options.

Some config is still baked into the settings.py file; usually this is either things that cannot be expressed well in YAML, things that should be common to all LASS installations, and also the bootstrap for the YAML configuration system.

Configuration files

You will generally need to supply some Django settings to LASS before it works, most notably the database and assets locations. These use the standard Django names (DATABASES, TEMPLATE_DIRS etc), but are read from YAML files (ending in ‘.yml’) in the private directory. (The name is an artefact from its use to store URY-private settings.)

LASS loads all *.yml files in Python string sort order, with each settings file clobbering any previous Django settings loaded. This means that you can store site and server-specific settings in files named such as to come after more general settings files, and indeed this is how URY resolve differences between environments.

File format

Each file should contain a map of Django values to the YAML representations of their settings, as interpreted by PyYAML. An example:

# This can be overridden by YAML files loaded later
DEBUG: False

# Paths
MEDIA_ROOT: /usr/local/assets/media
STATIC_ROOT: /usr/local/assets/static

# Admins
ADMINS:
    - - Head of Everything
      - hoe@radio.example.com
    - - Webmaster
      - sucker@radio.example.com
SERVER_EMAIL: noreply@example.com

Files can obviously contain any YAML syntax that PyYAML understands.

Defaults

Some Django settings have default values baked into settings.py in the event that they are not specified in any private YAML. See the code file for information.