I am developing a django app which will run on the raspberry pi 3 in production.
I must know at the start of the app if its running on raspberry, or in dev environment. In dev i use fake sensor data instead of the pins.
Until now i used this method:
from sys import platform as _platform
test_environment = "win" in _platform or "darwin" in _platform
This was working nice for both my pc and mac, but now i would like to deploy this to an ubuntu webserver online. Raspbian is also a linux dist, so i need something else.
This is my currently working solution, but it hurts me deep inside. Any suggestion to make it better?
try:
import RPi.GPIO as gpio
test_environment = False
except:
test_environment = True
Your solution is basically fine - I would improve it to just catch the specific error you're really looking for:
try:
import RPi.GPIO as gpio
test_environment = False
except (ImportError, RuntimeError):
test_environment = True
This way if some other error occurs (out of memory, a poorly timed control-c, etc.), you won't believe you are in a test environment when you're not. You could also add more checks just to be sure (e.g. only check for import RPi.GPIO if you're on linux).