Appending to Django default settings

You can have a very minimal settings.py file in Django 1.7. Have you ever wondered how Django provides all the default settings?

All the default settings are defined in the module django/conf/global_settings.

There is usually no need to access the global_setting directly as explained in the doc..

The settings object will automatically get the default from the global_setting module on demand:

from django.conf import settings

if settings.DEBUG:
    # Do something

Or you can override a setting in settings.py like below:

DEBUG = True

However, if you ever want to add something to an existing setting instead of replacing it, you will need to do something like below in settings.py:

from django.conf.global_settings import TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS += (
    'django.core.context_processors.request',
)