Google Cloud Django if os.getenv('SERVER_SOFTWARE', '').startswith('Google App Engine'): not working

Question

I am working on a Google Cloud Django Project.

I am trying to check in settings.py if I am running in Development or Production mode.

I added the following block of code to test if the SOFTWARE where the program is running either is on my machine or on Google Cloud Servers.

# | settings.py |
if os.getenv('SERVER_SOFTWARE', '').startswith('Google App Engine'):
    #code to execute in production
else:
    #code to execute in development

I noticed that the if statment is always false, so I decited to debug the os.environ dict. The result of the debug is that the value of the key SERVER_SOFTWARE of the enviroment is equal to gunicorn/20.1.0.

As written in the correct answer of this stackoverflow question, when running on production (so on Google Cloud Severs App Engine), the value of SERVER_SOFTWARE should be Google App Engine/X.Y.Z, where X, Y and Z represent the version of Google Cloud. But, as I said, my value, when running on App Engine, is not like that, it is gunicorn/20.1.0.

So, how do I make the program know if I am running either in development or production?

Answer 1

I'll present a couple other solutions.

(1) GAE provided env vars

GAE automatically sets environment variables that you probably don't set when running locally. I use this:

version = os.environ.get('GAE_VERSION', 'local')

You'll get the actual version in production and 'local' on your machine.

(2) Check the request URL

This is Flask but there must be something similar in Django:

request.url_root == 'http://localhost:8080/'