Set environment variables in a .env file

Why configure environment variables per project

When you work on your projects, one assumption you will usually have is that your development environment will look like your project's runtime environment with all of its environment variables. The runtime environment is usually your "production" setting: a web app or API, a model in a pipeline, or a software package that gets distributed.

For environment variables that are set globally in your shell, see how to take full control of your shell environment variables. This helps you understand the difference between project-specific and global settings.

For organizing environment variables that apply across all projects and sessions, see using dotfiles for environment management. This is useful for settings you want available everywhere, not just in one project.

How to configure environment variables for your project

Here, I'm assuming that you follow the practice of One project should get one git repository and that you use pyprojroot to define relative paths to the project root.

To configure environment variables for your project, a recommended practice is to create a .env file in your project's root directory, which stores your environment variables as such:

export ENV_VAR_1 = "some_value"
export DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING = "some_database_connection_string"
export ENV_VAR_3 = "some_other_value"

We use the export syntax here because we can, in our shells, run the command source .env and have the environment variables defined in there applied to our environment.

Now, if you're using a Python project, make sure you have the package python-dotenv (Github repo here) installed in the conda environment. Then, in your Python .py source files:

from dotenv import load_dotenv
from pyprojroot import here
import os

dotenv_path = here() / ".env"
load_dotenv(dotenv_path=dotenv_path)  # this will load the .env file in your project directory root.

# Now, get the environment variable.
DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING = os.getenv("DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING")

In this way, your runtime environment variables get loaded into the runtime environment, and become available to all child processes started from within the shell (e.g. Jupyter Lab, or Python, etc.).

Always gitignore your .env file

Your .env file might contain some sensitive secrets. You should always ensure that your .gitignore file contains .env in it.

See also: the gitignore setup in the project configuration section.