Accessing application secrets with environment variables

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user_secrets_with_env_variables

Skill - Accessing application secrets with environment variables

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Skills Required

Please make sure to have all the skills mentioned above to understand and execute the code mentioned below. Go through the above skills if necessary for reference or revision

It is not advisable to keep sensitive application data like usernames , passwords, api keys in the source code or hard-code them in our code. The reasons not to do so is

  • You have to change and re-deploy the code once the usernames, passwords change
  • We can accidentally commit our code to open source repositories like GitHub etc., where our sensitive data will be exposed

One of the easy ways to maintain sensitive data is using system environment variables.
The advantages of storing sensitive application data in system environment variables is

  • Data is not hard-coded in the application code. Hence no need to change code when usernames, passwords change
  • Environment variables are not present in the application code folder. Hence sensitive data will not be pushed to source control like git and sensitive data cannot be taken just by copy pasting the application code folder.
  • Environment variables can be edited only if a person enters the credentials of the machine/computer.

Creating environment variables in a windows machine

  • Open ‘Edit system environment variables’ from windows search bar

edit_sys_env_variables_in_start_menu

  • Click on ‘Environment Variables’ button
  • Click on ‘New’ button in ‘System Variables’ section
  • Enter environment variable name and value and click '‘OK’

creating_system_env_variable
You can also edit or delete a system environment variable in the same manner

In our example shown in the figure, we created an environment variable named app_password and its value is mysupersecret

accessing system environment variables using ‘os.getenv’ function

# import os module
import os

# access the environment variable named 'app_password'
# The value returned when environment variable is not present in the stystem is given as the second input
val = os.getenv('app_password', 'default_value')

print('The value of app_password is {0}'.format(val))
# this should print
# The value of app_password is mysupersecret

env_var_output

Video

The video tutorial for this post can be found here

Online Interpreter

You can run these codes online at https://www.programiz.com/python-programming/online-compiler/ , https://repl.it/

References

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