Funnily enough, in the dev team I'm in, we build "11" factor apps, which keep the code in a git repo. I build a lot of django apps and use the idiom at the bott

Funnily enough, in the dev team I'm in, we build "11" factor apps, which keep the code in a git repo. I build a lot of django apps and use the idiom at the bottom of the settings.py that looks like: try: from local_settings import * except ImportError: pass We then have dev_settings.py, local_settings.py, and qa_settings.py in the code repo. The deployment system will copy ${env}_settings.py to local_settings.py. So... assuming you aren't using something like zookeeper (or etcd if you're more bleeding edge), I 100% agree with you :) This is why I say my team builds 11 factor apps :)