Environment-Based Settings and Secrets

Now that we've covered user accounts and PostgreSQL in Authentication and Production, our Django CRUD app is no longer just a local demo.

It has real production-shaped concerns:

• a SECRET_KEY
• login/logout redirects
• PostgreSQL database credentials
• DEBUG behavior
• host/domain restrictions

Right now, some of those values may still be hard-coded in django_crud/settings.py. That works locally, but it is dangerous for deployment.

A startup engineer habit is: code goes in Git, secrets stay outside Git.

In this lesson, we'll make settings environment-based so the same project can run safely in local development and later in production. We will not deploy with Gunicorn yet — that comes next in Static Files and Gunicorn Deployment.