WEB 1.1 - Module 4: Lesson 2

Learning Outcomes 💫

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to...

Explain why it is important to hide secrets using a .env file.
Use a .env file to hide secrets such as API keys and retrieve them in your code.

Videos 🎥

Vid 1 - Walking through a virtual environment and accessing a SECRET_KEY

Exercises 💪

Go back to your Homework 3 (More Forms) submission and use a .env file to hide the API key for the GIF Search API. Then in the code, call load_dotenv() and use the os.getenv() library function to retrieve and use it.

Written Companion 🗒

<aside> 🤔 How can we easily manage configuration values, such as the URL for a database connection or the production server information, spread out in multiple files of a project?

</aside>

Any project that utilizes servers and databases, or multiple global constants, will require environment variables (sometimes synonymous with configuration variables).

<aside> 💡 A variable that contains information required in a global scope that references details about how to connect to external components or internal settings repeated in multiple files can be definied as a environment variable.

</aside>

Examples of environment variables: