I thought of using the following to run a normally-run-as-shell inside python:
x = subprocess.call('source credentials.txt', shell=True)
print os.environ
However, it seems that the environment doesn't update in the rest of the script. Why not? And is there a way to get over this with using shell (and not python) to update my os vars?
Take a look at this library: https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/
I've used it before and it's simple and does the job.Instead of 'credentials.txt' you put the key-value pairs in '.env' file and load it during program start using a single 'load' call.
Here is somple code:
import os
from pathlib import Path
from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv
# write some sample contents in the current dir
Path.cwd().joinpath(".env").write_text("USERNAME=My user name\nPASSWORD=MyCust0mS3cr3tPAsw00d")
# loads from .env file in CWD
load_dotenv(find_dotenv())
# here is the magic:
print(os.environ["PASSWORD"])
You can run a subprocess to source the results and print the os.environ back to the current python process. For example:
os.environ=ast.literal_eval(subprocess.check_output(
'source credentials.txt && python -c "import os;print os.environ"', shell=True)
)
Answer inspired by this answer.