In this quick tutorial we will demonstrate how to load additional environment variables from file into your python application.

It loads key value pairs from a file and append it to its current runtime environment variables, so your current environment is unaffected.

python-dotenv

We will make use of the package python-dotenv so we will need to install the python package with pip:

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python3 -m pip install python-dotenv

The env file

I will create the .env in my current working directory with the content:

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APPLICATION_NAME=foo
APPLICATION_OWNER=bar

The application

This is a basic demonstration of a python application which loads the additional environment variables from file, then we will use json.dumps(.., indent=2) so that we can get a pretty print of all our environment variables:

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import os
import json
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv('.env')

print(json.dumps(dict(os.environ), indent=2))

When we run the application the output will look something like this:

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{
  "SHELL": "/bin/bash",
  "PWD": "/home/ubuntu/env-vars",
  "LOGNAME": "ubuntu",
  "HOME": "/home/ubuntu",
  "LANG": "C.UTF-8",
  "TERM": "xterm-256color",
  "USER": "ubuntu",
  "LC_CTYPE": "C.UTF-8",
  "PATH": "/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin",
  "SSH_TTY": "/dev/pts/0",
  "OLDPWD": "/home/ubuntu",
  "APPLICATION_NAME": "foo",
  "APPLICATION_OWNER": "bar"
}

As we can see our two environment variables was added to the environment. If you would like to access your two environment variables, we can do the following:

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import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv('.env')

APPLICATION_NAME = os.getenv('APPLICATION_NAME')
APPLICATION_OWNER = os.getenv('APPLICATION_OWNER')

print('Name: {0}, Owner: {1}'.format(APPLICATION_NAME, APPLICATION_OWNER))

And when we run that, the output should be the following:

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Name: foo, Owner: bar

Thank You

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