Setting Environment Variables

Nice people from the Internet wrote here about how to use dotenv to pass around credentials that you want to keep private: https://help.pythonanywhere.com/pages/environment-variables-for-web-apps/. So I feel that it make sense and for different projects from now on I used python dotenv.

Set of steps to follow

1. create venv in your project directory python -m venv venv && venv\Scripts\activate.bat
2. Install python-dotenv into your virtualenv: pip install python-dotenv
3. Set my PRIVATE_VARIABLE='test': vim .env
4. Inside .env add a variable and assign the value 'test' to it:

# myapp settings
PRIVATE_VARIABLE='test'

We populated this PRIVATE_VARIABLE with test which I consider to keep secret. This will be an environment variable to pass around within venv

1. The variable inside .dotenv retrieved in app.py as follows:

from dotenv import dotenv_values

DOTENV_CONFIG = dotenv_values(".env")  # access dict object {"PRIVATE_VARIABLE": "test"}
API_URL = DOTENV_CONFIG['AWS_ENDPOINT']

Additional step to fix variable "privacy"

1. I want to keep it away from others but available for python within this particular venv. I want to add .env to my .gitignore. This way when I post my code to Github I keep .env private (away from vcs). In .gitignore I add the following:

.env