Environment Variables

rfulcher

I am trying to find a host for my project and I recently started an account here. I am trying to do all my research and determine the best & secure way to deploy my Django application. I was wondering what is the best way to set up the environment variables. I have tried using DigitalOcean Apps and they have the environment variables accessible through the GUI. I was hoping to be able to do something like setting them up in .bashrc but I am not sure if that is the best approach. My overall plan is to have my local development laptop set up with my local settings and then have production settings pointing to environment variables. Then try and set up actions to be able to deploy from Github to Opalstack. This is my first Django project and hopefully the first of many. I have another project in the pipeline that I need to start working on as soon as I figure out what we will be doing for production and getting a process documented. Thanks for any help you can provide.

sean

I don't recommend setting them in bashrc - cron doesn't read bashrc, so if the server were unexpectedly rebooted or if your processes were terminated for some reason your app wouldn't have its environment when your cron job runs to restart it.

On our setup you can set environment variables in your app's uwsgi.ini file, eg:

env = FOO=bar

To set multiple variables, add a line with an env directive for each variable you need.

There are also Django projects that you can use to manage environment variables and settings for you, eg:

You could also set them in the app's start script that our installer sets up for you - it's a regular bash shell script so feel free to customize it.

Hope this helps 🙂

rfulcher

Sean,

Thanks very much for your input. The start script seems like a good idea. Do they all seem to be acceptable from a security standpoint? Is there one that is more secure than another?

Thanks very much.

sean

rfulcher All of the options I mentioned involve storing info in files.

If you keep your file and directory permissions secure then there aren't security concerns related to permissions.

The shell user running the application will have access to the info in the files, of course, so you'll also want to ensure that your application can't be exploited to expose that information to unauthorized users.