Command

This class provides a management command that identifies and displays differences between the current project settings and Django's default configuration. It supports multiple output formats, including a hash-style summary and a unified diff view, to highlight modified or custom settings. Users can optionally compare their configuration against a specific settings module instead of the global defaults.

Attributes

Attribute	Type	Description
help	string	Displays differences between the current settings.py and Django's default settings.
requires_system_checks	list = []	A list of system checks that must be performed before the command is executed, which is empty for this command.

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Methods

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add_arguments()

@classmethod
def add_arguments(
    parser: [CommandParser](../../base/commandparser.md?sid=django_core_management_base_commandparser)
)

Configures the command line argument parser with options for filtering settings and selecting output formats.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
parser	[CommandParser](../../base/commandparser.md?sid=django_core_management_base_commandparser)	The argument parser instance used to define CLI flags like --all, --default, and --output.

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handle()

@classmethod
def handle(
    **options: dict
) - > string

Executes the command logic by comparing the current project settings against a default settings module and returning the formatted differences.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
**options	dict	A dictionary of parsed command line arguments including 'all', 'default', and 'output' format preferences.

Returns

Type	Description
string	A newline-delimited string containing the formatted differences between the user settings and the default settings.

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output_hash()

@classmethod
def output_hash(
    user_settings: dict,
    default_settings: dict,
    **options: dict
) - > list

Formats the settings differences using a key-value pair style where non-default or modified settings are flagged with hash marks.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
user_settings	dict	The dictionary of current active settings from the Django project.
default_settings	dict	The dictionary of settings from the comparison module or Django's global defaults.
**options	dict	Configuration options, specifically checking the 'all' flag to determine if unmodified settings should be included.

Returns

Type	Description
list	A list of strings representing settings, where modified values are shown directly and new settings are suffixed with '###'.

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output_unified()

@classmethod
def output_unified(
    user_settings: dict,
    default_settings: dict,
    **options: dict
) - > list

Formats the settings differences using a diff-like style, prefixing changes with plus and minus signs to indicate additions and modifications.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
user_settings	dict	The dictionary of current active settings from the Django project.
default_settings	dict	The dictionary of settings from the comparison module or Django's global defaults.
**options	dict	Configuration options, specifically checking the 'all' flag to determine if unmodified settings should be included in the output.

Returns

Type	Description
list	A list of color-coded strings showing removed default values and added user values.

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