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

Solution

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