"Actually I prefer to have only one settings file and configure everything else with environment variables. For me this is more clean." Heavily seconded. After

"Actually I prefer to have only one settings file and configure everything else with environment variables. For me this is more clean." Heavily seconded. After many years of having separate files, this grew very unwieldy with multiple environments, machines, developers, etc. The env-variable route is much better, much easier to configure separately for different machines, etc. Also, this is the way Heroku does it - you load up a new server and run several "set env variable to {X}" commands to configure it. I think this is based on the 12-factor app system. (http://www.12factor.net/ http://www.12factor.net/)