I apologize for my ignorance, I've never contributed before but I wanted to bring this up as a potential improvement.
I think there is still an even better way to do this but I'm not familiar with best practice. However, I do think referencing the developers OS environment variable in settings.py is better than including the .gitignore[.env] hardcoded password.
I'm guessing the best way to set this would be through an install process but that could be for another improvement/iteration.