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Application Configuration

The application is configured using environment variables. The following are the main environment variables that can be used to configure the application:

  • SECRET_KEY: A secret key for a particular Django installation. This is used to provide cryptographic signing, and should be set to a unique, unpredictable value.
  • DATABASE_URL: The URL of the database to use.
  • DATABASE_HOPE_URL: The URL of the Hope database to use.
  • REDIS_URL: The URL of the Redis server to use.
  • CELERY_BROKER_URL: The URL of the Celery broker to use.
  • STREAMING_BROKER_URL: The broker URL for the change streaming feature. Must be a RabbitMQ connection URL (e.g., amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672//) or console:// to log events locally.
  • ALLOWED_HOSTS: A list of strings representing the host/domain names that this Django site can serve.
  • DEBUG: A boolean that turns on/off debug mode.

For a complete list of all the available environment variables, please refer to the settings.py file.

Configuration Validation (smart-env)

The project uses smart-env for environment variable parsing and validation. During startup and deployment (e.g. database migrations or upgrades), Django runs system checks to verify configuration.

  • Required environment variables without defaults must be provided, otherwise Django will fail to start with a SystemCheckError showing smart_env.E001.
  • Variables with defined default values (like STREAMING_BROKER_URL which defaults to console://) will fall back automatically unless explicitly configured.