Unable to include openstack_dashboard.settings in other top-level django settings module

[Timur Sufiev]

In order to augment openstack_dashboard.settings with specific django application settings (namely, Murano) while editing neither openstack_dashboard.settings (it contains only settings related to vanilla openstack dashboards), nor /etc/openstack_dashoards/local_settings.py (it is for customization by admins) the following scheme was devised. Change DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE in Apache config/WSGI python module to 'muranodashboard.settings' which contains all Murano-specific settings and imports openstack_dashboard.settings, which in turn imports local.local_settings. This approach seemed fine until I coded it and ran: it immediately failed with 'ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty.' exception.

After spending some time in debugger, I found out that during 'openstack_dashboard.settings' module evaluation 'django.conf.Settings' class is instantiated and it requires the 'SECRET_KEY' parameter to be present in settings module referenced by DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable (which, in my case is 'muranodashboard.settings'). But if I try to avoid this error and define my own SECRET_KEY in 'muranodashboard.settings', I end up with 2 different SECRET_KEY values (one from muranodashboard.settings, the other hanging somewhere in horizon's machinery from local.local_settings / openstack_dashboard.settings) which is not good either.

This behaviour clearly seems like a bug, because openstack_dashboard.settings shouldn't invoke functions that rely on SECRET_KEY being already defined in DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE module.

[Ana Krivokapić (akrivoka)]

This sounds like a circular dependency, i.e. you are probably importing something in the muranodashboard.settings, which in turn tries to import something from the settings:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19128540/django-improperlyconfigured-the-secret-key-setting-must-not-be-empty

[Timur Sufiev (tsufiev-x)]

Yes, it was my fault - I was importing some module from horizon. instead of openstack_dashboard.