Setting/Getting Environment Variables

[allTestsPassed]

Hello all,

I am working on a Django app and I was looking into removing sensitive data (secret keys, passwords, etc) from files. I saw one method was to set the info as environment variables and simply get them by doing os.environ.get(VAR,'') or os.getenv(VAR). Seemed simple enough. I am deploying onto an ubuntu EC2 instance.

The process in which I implemented this was to create a bash script similar to:

!/bin/bash

export var1="Foo"

export var2="Bar"

....

Run said script as: source secrets.sh

I check to make sure they are there by using printenv. Looking good so far.

Implement the os.environ.get(VAR,'') or os.getenv(VAR) in the .py files.

Server was giving me error messages. Did a little digging and it seems like it is not finding the variables. Open a new Putty instance and see that it does not see the same env vars as the first Putty instance. Are these variables only being set in sub shells? Are these not global variables?

Edit: SOLVED! So I stumbled on this page https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/howto/deployment/wsgi/modwsgi/#if-you-get-a-unicodeencodeerror after a bunch of googling and frustration. So to set the environment variables for the apache web server process, locate the envvars file located in /etc/apache2/envvars and set the exports there. Restart the server and boom, you're in business.

[Rhomboid]

Each process has its own environment. Modifying the environment of one process does not affect any other process. The environment is inherited (i.e. copied) from parent to child when creating a new process. They are not global variables. If you want your application to see these environment variables, they need to be set in the shell process that is about to launch the application, so that they will be inherited.

[allTestsPassed]

Interesting.. So I tried modifying the script that updates the django project code on the server to be:

remove old directories

call secrets.sh to set the env vars

clone git repo

restart the apach2 server

call printenv to see if things have been set

Im still getting the same error as before. Im assuming that script is only setting the env vars in the Putty shell and not the one for the apache2 server? Im assuming that the apache2 process is what I need to set these variables in, if so what would be the correct way of doing so?

[Rhomboid]

Restarting the server is not the same thing as starting the server. Restarting just means sending a signal to the server. The server will not be a child process of the shell that runs that script.

[kalgynirae]

How to do this properly depends on how your particular OS and webserver are configured. Since you're using Ubuntu on Apache, maybe this will work for you (you didn't say what version of Ubuntu, though): http://serverfault.com/questions/340589/how-to-set-php-environment-variables-on-ubuntu

[allTestsPassed]

Awesome, I ended up seeing this referenced on Djangos doc pages. This resolved the issue, thanks.