How to set up environment variables in Django?

Django does not come with built-in support for dot env(.env) files. But we have an amazing Python package for that.

Let’s first install this package in our Django project’s virtual environment.

pip install python-dotenv

The next step is to create your .env files at the root level where your manage.py resides, and define your environment variables similar to the given example below.

FOO="BAR"

Now just open your Django settings.py files and import the package at the top of it.

import dotenv

It's time to read/parse the .env file that we have created above in our settings.py file. Note: Keep in mind that this code needs to be put just after your BASE_DIR is defined.

import os
import dotenv

dotenv_file = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ".env")
if os.path.isfile(dotenv_file):
    dotenv.load_dotenv(dotenv_file)

That’s it, now you can simply read your environment variables using os library. An example would be like this inside your settings.py file:

import os

FOO = os.getenv("FOO")

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Setup ".env" files in Django