how to know which environment running unit tests in django works on

Question

I want to separate my prod settings from my local settings. I found this library django-split-settings, which worked nicely.

However somewhere in my code I have something like this:

if settings.DEBUG:

  # do debug stuff
else:
  # do prod stuff

The problem is that when i run my unit test command:

./run ./manage.py test

the above if statements evaluates settings.DEBUG as false. Which makes me wonder, which settings file is the test command reading from and how to correct it

What I have tried

I tried running a command like this:

./run ./manage.py test --settings=bx/settings

gives me this crash:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./manage.py", line 10, in <module>
    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
  File "/beneple/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 350, in execute_from_command_line
    utility.execute()
  File "/beneple/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 302, in execute
    settings.INSTALLED_APPS
  File "/beneple/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 55, in __getattr__
    self._setup(name)
  File "/beneple/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 43, in _setup
    self._wrapped = Settings(settings_module)
  File "/beneple/venv/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/conf/__init__.py", line 99, in __init__
    mod = importlib.import_module(self.SETTINGS_MODULE)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/importlib/__init__.py", line 37, in import_module
    __import__(name)
ImportError: Import by filename is not supported.

any ideas?