How to set an environment variable in Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (Python)

Question

I have been working on a Django application lately, trying to get it to work with Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

In my .ebextensions/python.config file, I have set the following:

option_settings:
  - namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment
    option_name:  ProductionBucket
    value: s3-bucket-name
  - namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment
    option_name:  ProductionCache
    value:  memcached-server.site.com:11211

However, whenever I look on the server, no such environment variables are set (and as such, aren't accessible when I try os.getenv('ProductionBucket')

I came across this this page which appears to attempt to document all the namespaces. I've also tried using PARAM1 as the option name, but have had similar results.

How can I set environment variables in Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

EDIT:
I have also tried adding a command prior to all other commands which would just export an environment variable:

commands:
 01_env_vars:
  command: "source scripts/env_vars"

... This was also unsuccessful

Answer 1

I did the following to also get my environment variables that I configure in cloudformation in the non-container phase, eg the regular commands

/opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config environment | python -c "import json,sys; obj=json.load(sys.stdin); f = open('/tmp/eb_env', 'w'); f.write('\n'.join(map(lambda x: 'export ' + x[0] + '=' + x[1], obj.iteritems())))"

Once you execute this command you will have a file in /tmp/eb_env with all your environment variables. Just execute the following before a command that needs the environment variables

source /tmp/eb_env

Example

source /tmp/eb_env && echo $MY_CUSTOM_ENV

In the config file of elastic beanstalk, it looks like this:

commands:
    02-make-sure-we-can-get-our-env-in-the-instance-itself:
        command: "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config environment | python -c 'import json,sys; obj=json.load(sys.stdin); f = open(\'/tmp/eb_env\', \'w\'); f.write(\'\n\'.join(map(lambda x: \'export \' + x[0] + \'=\' + x[1], obj.iteritems())))'"