How can we store a JSON credential to ENV variable in python?

Question

{
    "type": "service_account",
    "project_id": "project_id",
    "private_key_id": "private_key_id",
    "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\n",
    "client_email": "email",
    "client_id": "id",
    "auth_uri": "uri_auth",
    "token_uri": "token_urin",
    "auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "auth_provider_x509_cert_url",
    "client_x509_cert_url": "client_x509_cert_url"
}

I tried encoding and decoding the JSON but it didn't work

I even tried using /// in place of " "

So I am using sheets-api. What I want to achieve is loading the path-for-json-file from .env variable

scope=['https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds',
      'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive',
      'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file',
      'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets'
      ]
credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name(r"path-for-json-file", scope)
client = gspread.authorize(credentials)

Answer 1

A simpler way using a single env variable

• First encode your JSON in base-64 as follows:

import json
import base64
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv


service_key = {
    "type": "service_account",
    "project_id": "project_id",
    "private_key_id": "private_key_id",
    "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\n",
    "client_email": "email",
    "client_id": "id",
    "auth_uri": "uri_auth",
    "token_uri": "token_urin",
    "auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "auth_provider_x509_cert_url",
    "client_x509_cert_url": "client_x509_cert_url"
}

# convert json to a string
service_key = json.dumps(service_key)

# encode service key
encoded_service_key = base64.b64encode(service_key.encode('utf-8'))

print(encoded_service_key)
# b'many_characters_here'

• In your .env file, add an environment variable SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY with the value of encoded_service_key:

SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY = b'a_long_string'

• Now to convert the encoded string back to JSON:

# get the value of `SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY`environment variable
load_dotenv(find_dotenv())
encoded_key = os.getenv("SERVICE_ACCOUNT_KEY")

# remove the first two chars and the last char in the key
encoded_key = str(encoded_key)[2:-1]

# decode
original_service_key= json.loads(base64.b64decode(encoded_key).decode('utf-8'))

print(original_service_key['private_key_id'])
# private_key_id

# credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name(
#     original_service_key, scope)
# client = gspread.authorize(credentials)