id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
25034	Remove attempts to access settings at import time	David Evans	nobody	"There are currently two places (that I can find) in Django where settings are read at import time:
1. [https://github.com/django/django/blob/ec4f219ecb7a5e43d0353633fac4dac42d0ee492/django/core/cache/__init__.py#L32 django/django/core/cache/__init__.py]
2. [https://github.com/django/django/blob/ec4f219ecb7a5e43d0353633fac4dac42d0ee492/django/contrib/staticfiles/urls.py#L17 django/django/contrib/staticfiles/urls.py]

Case 1 is causing some people confusion when attempting to import things in `wsgi.py`, as the import breaks if it comes before `DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE` is defined. See for example: [https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise/issues/31#issuecomment-104185649]

This check on the contents of `settings.CACHE` seems to me to be superfluous as failing to define a default cache backend will trigger an `InvalidCacheBackendError` anyway when attempting to access it. I don't see that triggering `ImproperlyConfigured` on import adds much here.

Case 2 seems to be entirely redundant as it's only used for defining `urlpatterns` in that file and I can't find anything which uses this or any mention of it in the docs going back to v1.4. If I remove those lines the tests continue to pass, so I hoping this can be safely removed.

If we could remove these two cases then we have the simple rule that settings are not to be accessed at import time, and we won't have any subtle import-order requirements. "	Cleanup/optimization	new	Uncategorized	dev	Normal				Unreviewed	0	0	0	0	0	0