Handling EC2 ELB health checks and Django's ALLOWED_HOSTS setting.

settings.py

# Hosts/domain names that are valid for this site; required if DEBUG is False
# See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/settings/#allowed-hosts
ALLOWED_HOSTS = [
    'yourdomain.tld',
    '.compute-1.amazonaws.com', # allows viewing of instances directly
]

import requests
EC2_PRIVATE_IP  =   None
try:
    EC2_PRIVATE_IP  =   requests.get('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4', timeout = 0.01).text
except requests.exceptions.RequestException:
    pass

if EC2_PRIVATE_IP:
    ALLOWED_HOSTS.append(EC2_PRIVATE_IP)

Great,
I also have somewhat similar try/except block.