Supervisor, Celery, Virtualenvwrapper, Django: Could not import django settings even when pythonpath added to environment

Question

Sigh... figured out the error...

So! I have my settings.py file which contains:

[settings.py]
import os
BEETLEJUICE_STATE = os.environ.get('BTJC_STATE',  None)

if BEETLEJUICE_STATE == 'LOCAL':
    from local_settings import *
elif BEETLEJUICE_STATE == 'DEV':
    from development_settings import *
elif BEETLEJUICE_STATE == 'PROD':
    from production_settings import *
else:
    raise ImportError

<aside>
... which used to be the right way to do things (or so I was told). I'm planning to switch over to the way that Audrey and Danny recommend in Two Scoops of Django, the gist of which being:

settings/
    __init__.py
    base.py
    local.py
    test.py
    production.py

... and explicitly call my settings files from now on, e.g.
python manage.py runserver --settings='settings.production'
...which imports from base.py and has all the production-specific settings.
</aside>

... and I had BTJC_STATE being exported in the virtualenvwrapper postactivate file, except that by running celeryd via supervisor I wasn't activating anything and thereby skipping that file entirely! This raised the ImportError but I didn't realise that was where it was coming from =(

Adding a string explaining the exception is a good idea... and apparently using ImproperlyConfigured is a better way to raise for this issue. So by changing the one line below in my .conf file, it started working perfectly.

[program:celery_beetlejuice]
<snip>
environment=BTJC_STATE='LOCAL'
<snip>

So that works now and I'm happy, but I need to find a good way of setting environment variables (like database passwords, api keys, and such) that will work well with for inside a non-activated in-use virtualenv.

All advice welcome on that, message me and I'll update this with the solution =)