How to work with environment variables in Python

Question

How do I read environment variables in Python and set default values if they do not exist?

omar_linux · Accepted Answer

Reading environment variables
import os

# Get with default value
database_url = os.getenv('DATABASE_URL', 'sqlite:///db.sqlite3')

# Get (raises KeyError if not exists)
api_key = os.environ['API_KEY']

# Check if exists
if 'DEBUG' in os.environ:
    debug = os.environ['DEBUG'] == 'True'
Using python-dotenv
from dotenv import load_dotenv

# Load from .env file
load_dotenv()

# Now use os.getenv as usual
secret = os.getenv('SECRET_KEY')

1 Answer