I find I have to tell developers (sometimes even developers with a few years’ experience) again and again how to properly manage environment variables - so I write this simple post so that I can just send a link.
Don’ts: DO NOT ever write the keys in your code - you will forget and push the keys to your repo.
Do one of the followings (I use OPENAI_API_KEY
as an example and my preferred way is method 2):
export
commandexport OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-xxxxxxx
Test that key is correctly set as an environment variable
import os
if os.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY") is not None:
print("OPENAI_API_KEY is ready")
else:
print("OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable not found")
.env
filecreate a .env
file in the root of the project folder to store the environment variables - this file is gitignored by default (or add this file to .gitignore
)
create requirements.txt
and include packages to install by putting the following lines in the file (two packages as examples):
openai
python-dotenv
create a virtual environment and install the packages specified in requirements.txt
:
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
load keys from .env
file:
import openai
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()
openai.api_key = os.getenv('OPENAI_API_KEY')
Method 2 above is my preferred way especially when you have many environment variables to manage.
PS. The featured image for this post is generated using HiddenArt.ai.