# Usage

It’s strongly recommended to use the usual `from django.conf import settings` in your own code to access the configured settings.

But you can also OPTIONALLY use your app’s own settings object directly, by instantiating it in place:

    from myapp.models import MyAppConf

    myapp_settings = MyAppConf()

    print myapp_settings.SETTING_1

Note that accessing the settings that way means they don’t have a prefix.

`AppConf` instances don’t automatically work as proxies for the global settings. But you can enable this if you want by setting the `proxy` attribute of the inner `Meta` class to `True`:

    from appconf import AppConf

    class MyAppConf(AppConf):
        SETTING_1 = "one"
        SETTING_2 = (
            "two",
        )

        class Meta:
            proxy = True

    myapp_settings = MyAppConf()

    if "myapp" in myapp_settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
        print "yay, myapp is installed!"

In case you want to override some settings programmatically, you can simply pass the value when instantiating the `AppConf` class:

    from myapp.models import MyAppConf

    myapp_settings = MyAppConf(SETTING_1='something completely different')

    if 'different' in myapp_settings.SETTING_1:
        print "yay, I'm different!"

## Custom configuration

Each of the settings can be individually configured with callbacks. For example, in case a value of a setting depends on other settings or other dependencies. The following example sets one setting to a different value depending on a global setting:

    from django.conf import settings
    from appconf import AppConf

    class MyCustomAppConf(AppConf):
        ENABLED = True

        def configure_enabled(self, value):
            return value and not settings.DEBUG

The value of `MYAPP_ENABLED` will vary depending on the value of the global `DEBUG` setting.

Each of the app settings can be customized by providing a method `configure_<lower_setting_name>` that takes the default value as defined in the class attributes of the `AppConf` subclass or the override value from the global settings as the only parameter. The method must return the value to be use for the setting in question.

After each of the `configure_*` methods has been called, the `AppConf` class will additionally call a main `configure` method, which can be used to do any further custom configuration handling, e.g. if multiple settings depend on each other. For that a `configured_data` dictionary is provided in the setting instance:

    from django.conf import settings
    from appconf import AppConf

    class MyCustomAppConf(AppConf):
        ENABLED = True
        MODE = 'development'

        def configure_enabled(self, value):
            return value and not settings.DEBUG

        def configure(self):
            mode = self.configured_data['MODE']
            enabled = self.configured_data['ENABLED']
            if not enabled and mode != 'development':
                print "WARNING: app not enabled in %s mode!" % mode
            return self.configured_data

Note

Don’t forget to return the configured data in your custom `configure` method if you edit it.