--- title: Environment Variables .env with Python slug: environment-variables-env-with-python published_at: 2021-01-03 08:00:14 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:06 +0000 summary: description: In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of managing environment variables with .env. ## Resources - https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/ ## Table of contents 1:18 Setting environment variables with export 2:25 Create .env file 2:55 Using .env with Stripe Samples 4:59 Using .env with python-dotenv ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, python, .env, python-dotenv, @cjav_dev] views: 26872 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/environment-variables-env-with-python youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecshCQU6X2U youtube_id: ecshCQU6X2U embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ecshCQU6X2U thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ecshCQU6X2U/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Environment Variables .env with Python *Published: January 03, 2021* *Views: 26872* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecshCQU6X2U) [![Environment Variables .env with Python](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ecshCQU6X2U/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecshCQU6X2U) ## Description In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of managing environment variables with .env. ## Resources - https://pypi.org/project/python-dotenv/ ## Table of contents 1:18 Setting environment variables with export 2:25 Create .env file 2:55 Using .env with Stripe Samples 4:59 Using .env with python-dotenv ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript [Music] an environment variable is a mechanism that you can use to set a custom value and then use that value later to change the way a running process behaves so their data usually changes pretty infrequently and the application is going to treat them like constants rather than mutable variables you could think of these as things that you would consider hard coding but would rather keep the value out of your code because either it changes between environments or because hard coding the value would leak some sensitive information like your API keys so there's a couple common use cases for environment variables you may have heard of you've got execution modes domain names API keys that path variable that you're used to seeing so for API keys this is really the core use case when using environment variables for a stripe integration because exposing your secret keys can lead to a bad day so rather than hard coding your stripe API keys right in your code it's better to keep them in some sort of environment variable and even better if that file is secure encrypted and really only accessible to those who should have access to your full stripe accountant all right let's take a look at how we can interact with environment variables directly in our terminal so we can do things like set an environment variable by saying export X equals 1 to 3 and then echoing that back dollar X that's how we access the environment variable directly in our shell now we might also have a file called something like dot in environment variables that looks something like this where we have settings where we can say setting equals value and if we source that file in bash then those environment variables will be available to us so often times in your bash RC or your bash profile you'll be modifying environment variables that you want to be loaded every time a new bash session starts so how does this pertain to stripe so we use a pattern within stripe samples and with developer office hours where we create . --an file and then we use a suite of tools and libraries that allow us to import and merge those environment variables that are stored in the dot and file with those that are globally available on our machines so we can create a dot end file here and set maybe we have our stripe secret key stripe publishable key and then maybe like a demo variable abc123 okay and we're gonna go through in in the language of your choice and we will load these environment variables with the dot end packages and see how to use them within our programs all right let's take a look at how we use environment variables within the stripe samples so we head over to github and check out all of these different stripe samples which are pre-built integrations on how to that demonstrate how to build stripe stripe integrations for different products and different scenarios so if we look at this setup subscriptions stripe sample you'll notice that in the root of the project there's a dot n dot example file this dot n dot example is a template for your dot n file which will hold your your API keys and some other settings that are applicable to the sample so let's clone down this sample and take a look at where the environment variables are set so that you can go in and set up your own when working with stripe samples so you'll notice that in the root we still have this dot m dot example and we expect that that's going to be dropped into one of the server directories so I'm going to go into dot Ruby and add a dot N file or I'm sorry into the Ruby directory in the server in the server directory and add a dot n file so we want to look at the example and we want to make sure that our server matches the the keys match this the same names so I'm going to copy those over so now we have a dot end file that has our striped publishable key and we have a stripe secret key and a webhook secret might be for handling web hooks and you might have you might also have a stripe plane NID happen to have one called movies and so that's how you modify the dot end file so if we change directories into the server directory and start the Ruby server with Ruby that server dot RB that will start up a new server at localhost for two for two that we can navigate to and now our our API keys are going to be used when working with this demo all right let's see how to use and work with environment variables with Python so we're going to initialize a new virtual environment here pip install Python dot n this is going to be a package that will allow us to load environment variables from a file called dot n and merge those with a with our globally available environment variables so now we can create a new file called demo dot pi and in here we'll import OS because OS is the package that allows us to access environment variables and we'll say from dot n we want to import load end and find dot end ok so the first thing we want to do is load dot N and we can pass that an argument called find end and this will search for the dot end file and now we can print OS dot get N and our environment variable name so if we pull up our dot env file here we can see that stripe secret this is the name of the environment variable that we want to print out so we can print out the secret here so maybe we say like secret ok and then I also wanted to show that we can print out X which is an environment variable that we defined globally so let's print both of those out and see how that works now typically you're going to use this OS that get in stripe secret to set the API key when you're initializing the striped Python library okay so let's go run it and we see that we printed out X which is this globally available environment variable that we set to one two three and we printed out secret you'll notice that if we cat dot n stripe secret is set here but we cannot echo it out because it's not globally available we haven't sourced n and the Python dot n package it's job is to load the environment variables from dot n the file and merge those with those globally available environment variables cool so that's how you use environment variables with Python alright hopefully you found this useful we'll see you next time you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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