More on Environment Variables and Local Settings

(See the earlier post)

A little more research after a suggestion from the server admin has confirmed that I can’t see Apache environment variables with os.environ in a WSGI interface. Instead, those are available through the request object. Since I don’t yet have a request object when starting up the app, I had to find a new way to ID the instance.

My server admin suggested that he add a system environment variable that would hold the instance name. I can read those variables just fine. He did, I read it, and all is well. New code:

import os
TIER = os.environ.get('TIER','') ## get the value of the TIER env variable

if fqdn == 'dashdrum_laptop':          ## laptop
    SERVER_ENVIRONMENT = 'Laptop'
elif TIER == 'dev':                ## dev server
    SERVER_ENVIRONMENT = 'DEV'
elif TIER == 'qa':                 ## qa server
    SERVER_ENVIRONMENT = 'QA'
elif TIER == 'prod':               ## production server
    SERVER_ENVIRONMENT = 'PROD'

Note that I’m still using the fqdn to ID the laptop.