Determine if Django is running under the development server

Question

Is there a way to determine if Django is running on localhost and setting the DEBUG variable in settings.py accordingly.

So that if I run the server locally it will set DEBUG to True and otherwise set it to False.

Localhost: python manage.py runserver
Not localhost: python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Answer 1

This is not the best approach, but it works :)
For something better you can use django-configurations

import sys    
# Determine if in Production or Development
if (len(sys.argv) >= 2 and sys.argv[1] == 'runserver'):
    DEBUG = True 
    #...       
else:
    DEBUG = False
    #...

Or you can use it as one-liner as mentioned by little_birdie in the comments:
DEBUG = (len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1] == 'runserver')

Answer 2

Could not have a permalink to this accepted and related answer to your question. So, just pasting it:-

server = request.META.get('wsgi.file_wrapper', None)
if server is not None and server.__module__ == 'django.core.servers.basehttp':
    print 'inside dev'

Of course, wsgi.file_wrapper might be set on META, and have a class from a module named django.core.servers.basehttp by extreme coincidence on another server environment, but I hope this will have you covered.

PS: Please refer to How can I tell whether my Django application is running on development server or not? for more details