SECRET_KEY is required for collectstatic

[Jeanbouvatt]

Somewhere along my build process, I collect static to copy them to a nginx static file server.

# In a dockerfile
RUN python manage.py collectstatic --settings=core.settings.production --noinput

core/settings/production.py does not have a fixed SECRET_KEY defined, it refers to env var thus it crashes.

$ poetry run python manage.py collect-static --settings=core.settings.production
[...]
    from django_q.conf import Conf
  File "/.../python3.12/site-packages/django_q/conf.py", line 42, in <module>
    class Conf:
  File "/.../python3.12/site-packages/django_q/conf.py", line 209, in Conf
    SECRET_KEY = settings.SECRET_KEY
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/.../python3.12/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 111, in __getattr__
    raise ImproperlyConfigured("The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty.")
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: The SECRET_KEY setting must not be empty.

Having to define the SECRET_KEY in the build process feels very wrong. As such I cannot have a single image to be deployed multiple times if this SECRET_KEY is truly used.

Our simple solution is to set this var:

RUN SECRET_KEY=notimportant python manage.py collectstatic --settings=core.settings.production --noinput

however I am afraid that this SECRET_KEY might be used somewhere around there.

Could we envision a django_q that would not requires this SECRET_KEY in such step, i.e only when needed at runtime?