How to use environment variables with supervisor, gunicorn and django (1.6)

Question

I want to configure supervisor to control gunicorn in my django 1.6 project using an environment variable for SECRET_KEY.

I set my secret key in .bashrc as

export SECRET_KEY=[my_secret_key]  

And I have a shell script to start gunicorn:

NAME="myproject" LOGFILE=/home/django/myproject/log/gunicorn.log LOGDIR=$(dirname $LOGFILE) NUM_WORKERS=3 DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE=myproject.wsgi  USER=django GROUP=django IP=0.0.0.0 PORT=8001  echo "Starting $NAME"  cd /home/django/myproject/myproject source /home/django/.virtualenvs/myproject/bin/activate  test -d $LOGDIR || mkdir -p $LOGDIR  exec gunicorn ${DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE} \  --name $NAME \  --workers $NUM_WORKERS \  --user=$USER --group=$GROUP \  --log-level=debug \  --bind=$IP:$PORT  --log-file=$LOGFILE 2>>$LOGFILE 

Then to configure my project's gunicorn server in supervisor:

[program:my_django_project] directory=/home/django/my_django_project/my_django_project command=/home/django/my_django_project/my_django_project/gunicorn.sh user=django autostart=true autorestart=true stdout_logfile=/home/django/my_django_project/log/supervisord.log stderr_logfile=/home/django/my_django_project/log/supervisor_error.log 

If I start gunicorn using my shell script it doesn't throw any error but when I start it with supervisor it fails and I see in the logs that it doesn't "find" my SECRET_KEY.

What's the correct way to configure supervisor to read my shell variables (I wan't to keep them in my .bashrc unless there's a more appropriate way)?

Answer 1

OK, I guess I got it.

I had tried including

environment=SECRET_KEY="secret_key_with_non_alphanumeric_chars" 

in the conf file for supervisor but it didn't like the non alphanumeric chars and I didn't want to have my key in the conf file as I have it in git.

After loking at supervisor's docs I had also tried with:

HOME="/home/django", USER="django" 

but didn't work.

Finally I tried with this and is working now!:

environment=HOME="/home/django", USER="django", SECRET_KEY=$SECRET_KEY 

Maybe although it's working it's not the best solution. I'd be happy to learn more.

EDIT:

Finally, Ewan made me see that using the bash for setting the env vars wouldn't be the best option. So one solution, as pointed by #Ewan, would be to use:

[program:my_project] ... environment=SECRET_KEY="secret_key_avoiding_%_chars" 

Another solution I found, for those using virtualenv would be to export the env vars in the "activate" script of the virtualenv, that is, edit your virtualenv/bin/activate file and add at the end your SECRET_KEY.

This way you can use % chars as generated by key generators for django and is valid if you don't use supervisor.

I restarted my server without logging to check that it worked. With this option I don't have to edit my keys, I can keep my conf files versioned and it works whether I use supervisor, upstart or whatever (or nothing, just gunicorn).

Anyway, I know I haven't discovered anything new (well @Ewan raised an issue with supervisor) but I'm learning things and hope this can be useful to someone else.

Answer 2

Also if you use gunicorn config file:

gunicorn -c gunicorn.py myproject.wsgi 

It's possible to pass environment variables in the gunicorn.py file like this:

bind = "0.0.0.0:8001" workers = 3 proc_name = "myproject" user = "django" group = "django" loglevel = "debug" errorlog = "/home/django/myproject/log/gunicorn.log" raw_env = [    'DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@host/dbname',    'SECRET_KEY=mysecretkey', ]