Configuration

An instance is configured through the environment. The settings module, lapidarium.edges.settings, reads every value below and needs no edits of its own.

In the tables, required means the start fails without it and empty means an empty string or list. Lists are comma-separated.

Core

Variable	Default	What it sets
ENV	production	production turns on the hardening below; development and test leave it off
DEBUG	false	Django debug pages; also serves uploads from MEDIA_ROOT and allows setup_local
SECRET_KEY	required	Django's signing key; a long random string, never shared between instances
ALLOWED_HOSTS	localhost	Host names the site answers to; a leading dot matches every subdomain
DATABASE_URL	required	Database, e.g. postgres://user:password@host:5432/name; sqlite:///db.sqlite3 for development
ADMIN_URL	admin/	Path of the admin, with a trailing slash; the theme preview lives under it
SITE_NAME	lapidarium	Site title until the profile has a name; the admin header always
LANGUAGE_CODE	pl	Default interface language, pl or en; a browser asking for the other gets it
TIME_ZONE	Europe/Warsaw	Time zone for calendar entries and feeds

With ENV=production the site redirects to HTTPS (except /healthz/), sends HSTS for a year with subdomains and preload, marks session and CSRF cookies secure, denies framing, serves static files through WhiteNoise, and trusts https://<host> for every entry in ALLOWED_HOSTS as a CSRF origin. It reads X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Host, so a TLS-terminating proxy in front is expected.

Files

Variable	Default	What it sets
STATIC_ROOT	staticfiles	Where collectstatic writes the engine's and the theme's static files
MEDIA_ROOT	media	Uploads on the filesystem, when no bucket is set
MEDIA_URL	/media/	URL prefix of uploads
GS_BUCKET_NAME	empty	Turns on Google Cloud Storage for uploads; the bucket must allow public read
GS_LOCATION	empty	Path prefix for uploads inside the bucket
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS	empty	Service-account key file for the bucket; unneeded on GCP with an attached account

Django serves uploads only with DEBUG on. In production, either set a bucket or have the proxy serve MEDIA_ROOT at MEDIA_URL.

Caching

Variable	Default	What it sets
CACHE_URL	locmemcache://	Default cache; rate limits count here
PAGE_CACHE_URL	filecache:///tmp/lapidarium-pages	Rendered public pages; must be shared by all workers
PAGE_CACHE_SECONDS	600	How long a rendered page lives; any content change clears them all

Both URLs take the django-environ cache schemes, e.g. rediscache://host:6379/1. With more than one container, point both at a shared cache: a per-container cache keeps stale pages after an edit and counts rate limits per container.

Mail and newsletter

Variable	Default	What it sets
EMAIL_URL	consolemail://	Mail backend for the contact form, e.g. smtp+tls://user:password@host:587
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL	webmaster@localhost	Sender of contact form mail
NEWSLETTER_BACKEND	log	log writes sign-ups to the log; mailchimp adds them to an audience
MAILCHIMP_API_KEY	empty	Mailchimp API key, required with mailchimp
MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID	empty	Mailchimp audience ID, required with mailchimp; new subscribers confirm by mail

The contact form appears once the profile has an e-mail address; messages go there, with the sender as reply-to, at most five per sender an hour.

Proxies

Variable	Default	What it sets
TRUSTED_PROXY_HOPS	1 in production, else 0	Proxies in front that append to X-Forwarded-For; rate limits key on the address the outermost one saw

Set it to the number of proxies that append to the header: 1 behind one reverse proxy, 2 behind a CDN and a proxy. Too high and a client can forge its address; 0 ignores the header.

Themes

Variable	Default	What it sets
SITE_THEME	base	Active theme, by directory name
SITE_THEME_DIRS	empty	Extra theme directories, searched before the engine's

A theme name with no directory stops the start. See Themes.