cannot get environment variables set in Flask application

Question

I tried to set up sensitive information as environment variables in CentOS, and pass them to Flask config file used in main file, i.e. init.py . But it did not work. The Flask application is running under Apache.

I first edit /etc/environment as root user

MAIL_USERNAME="[email protected]"

then logout, login again Then verify MAIL_USERNAME is set by running

echo $MAIL_USERNAME

This works fine

And in configuration.py, this is how I set MAIL_USERNAME.

MAIL_USERNAME = os.environ.get('MAIL_USERNAME')

for testing purpose, I print out MAIL_USERNAME

in __init__.py
print(MAIL_USERNAME)

Then from terminal, if I run

python3.4 __init__.py

it print out correct values of MAIL_USERNAME

However, if I tested on web browser, MAIL_USERNAME is just not set. it shows NONE. I verify this by looking Apache log.

Any idea of how this works would be really appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

With your CLI, set the environment variable as you want. On Linux and macOS, this is done with export KEY=value.

After that, the environment variable KEY will be available for your Python script or Flask app via os.environ.get('KEY'), like this:

import os
print os.environ.get('key')

>>> value