Decouple helps you to organize your settings so that you can change parameters without having to redeploy your app. It also makes it easy for you to: * store parameters in ini or .env files; * define comprehensive default values; * properly convert values to the correct data type; * have only one configuration module to rule all your instances. * It was originally designed for Django, but became an independent generic too for separating settings from code. Import the config object: from decouple import config Retrieve the configuration parameters: SECRET_KEY = config('SECRET_KEY') DEBUG = config('DEBUG', default=False, cast=bool) EMAIL_HOST = config('EMAIL_HOST', default='localhost') EMAIL_PORT = config('EMAIL_PORT', default=25, cast=int)