django-appconf

It’s strongly recommended to use the usual from django.conf import settings in your own code to access the configured settings.

But you can also OPTIONALLY use your app’s own settings object directly, by instantiating it in place:

from myapp.models import MyAppConf

myapp_settings = MyAppConf()

print myapp_settings.SETTING_1

Note that accessing the settings that way means they don’t have a prefix.
AppConf instances don’t automatically work as proxies for the global settings. But you can enable this if you want by setting the proxy attribute of the inner Meta class to True:

from appconf import AppConf

class MyAppConf(AppConf):
    SETTING_1 = "one"
    SETTING_2 = (
        "two",
    )

    class Meta:
        proxy = True

myapp_settings = MyAppConf()

if "myapp" in myapp_settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    print "yay, myapp is installed!"

In case you want to override some settings programmatically, you can simply pass the value when instantiating the AppConf class:

from myapp.models import MyAppConf

myapp_settings = MyAppConf(SETTING_1='something completely different')

if 'different' in myapp_settings.SETTING_1:
    print "yay, I'm different!"

Custom configuration

Each of the settings can be individually configured with callbacks. For example, in case a value of a setting depends on other settings or other dependencies. The following example sets one setting to a different value depending on a global setting:

from django.conf import settings
from appconf import AppConf

class MyCustomAppConf(AppConf):
    ENABLED = True

    def configure_enabled(self, value):
        return value and not settings.DEBUG

The value of MYAPP_ENABLED will vary depending on the value of the global DEBUG setting.
Each of the app settings can be customized by providing a method configure_<lower_setting_name> that takes the default value as defined in the class attributes of the AppConf subclass or the override value from the global settings as the only parameter. The method must return the value to be use for the setting in question.
After each of the configure_* methods has been called, the AppConf class will additionally call a main configure method, which can be used to do any further custom configuration handling, e.g. if multiple settings depend on each other. For that a configured_data dictionary is provided in the setting instance:

from django.conf import settings
from appconf import AppConf

class MyCustomAppConf(AppConf):
    ENABLED = True
    MODE = 'development'

    def configure_enabled(self, value):
        return value and not settings.DEBUG

    def configure(self):
        mode = self.configured_data['MODE']
        enabled = self.configured_data['ENABLED']
        if not enabled and mode != 'development':
            print "WARNING: app not enabled in %s mode!" % mode
        return self.configured_data