How to pass a list/tuple into an environment variable for Django

Question

anybody know how I can pass a list into an environment variable? At the moment I am trying to put a list of codes into my settings.py file.

I have this in my .env file:

ALLOWED_CODES='AB01', 'AB02'

In my settings.py this is what I have:

ALLOWED_CODES = [os.environ.get('ALLOWED_POSTCODES')]

If run docker-compose config it is parsed as:

ALLOWED_CODES: '''AB01'', ''AB02'''

What I want is for it to return the exact list defined in the .env file.

Answer 1

os.environ.get('ALLOWED_POSTCODES') will always return a string. It's up to you to convert that into a list.

ALLOWED_CODES='AB01', 'AB02'

If you could change your .env file to

ALLOWED_CODES=AB01,AB02

then you could do

ALLOWED_CODES = os.environ.get('ALLOWED_POSTCODES').split(",")

You could probably parse the current value into your required list, but the string manipulation would be harder.

You might want to use a package that can handle .env files for you, for example django-environ.