Import AppConf using AppConfig.ready() hook

[paduszyk]

In docs, you mention that one should trigger the AppConf imports as soon as the Django starts. To do so, you suggest to import the conf modules from the app's models module.

django-appconf/README.rst

Lines 45 to 49 in e728a88

	``AppConf`` classes depend on being imported during startup of the Django
	process. Even though there are multiple modules loaded automatically,
	only the ``models`` modules (usually the ``models.py`` file of your
	app) are guaranteed to be loaded at startup. Therefore it's recommended
	to put your ``AppConf`` subclass(es) there, too.

I think that a much cleaner (?) solution (how are the models related to configuration, anyway?!) would be to do the import using the ready() hook of the app configuration class (put in the apps.py module).

For example, given an app polls with the conf submodule containing PollsConf(appconf.AppConf), one could go with:

import importlib
from contextlib import suppress

from django import apps


class PollsConfig(apps.AppConfig):
    name = "polls"
   
    def ready(self):
        super().ready()
        
        with suppress(ImportError):
            importlib.import_module(f"{self.name}.conf")
       
        # or simply
        # from . import conf
        # (this will make linters unhappy, though ...)

What do you think? Is it worth to be documented? I have recently used this approach and it works.

[carltongibson]

Hi @paduszyk — so yeah, that block in the README predates Django's AppConfig by about 3 years. As long as you're not using settings during the setup phase, you're likely good. (The gotcha might be when a model definition uses a setting... 🤔)

[paduszyk]

@carltongibson You're right, but I will check that ASAP.

Another idea would be to simply:

from .conf import PollsConf

settings = PollsConf()

in the app's __init__.py. Then, one can easily access "local" app-specific settings:

from django.db import models

from . import settings

class ChildModel(models.Model):
    parent = models.ForeignKey(to=settings.PARENT_MODEL, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

To access PARENT_MODEL setting from django.conf.settings, the app prefix must be included. This works fine for my project, but I need to remember to add this for each app.