Environment Variables

Option 1: Activate from CLI (Command Line Interface)

export team=ops

The export keyword is required so that the variable is available to child processes, such as scripts or applications launched from your shell.

Validate

echo $team

Option 2: Activate Variables While Starting a Script

You can set a temporary environment variable just for the duration of a command

team=ops python3 main.py

Sets team=ops only for the main.py process and any child processes that main.py spawns.

Option 3: Activate from .env file

1. Create the .env file:

echo "export team=ops" >> .env

1. Load the environment variables:

source .env

Using export in the .env file ensures the variable is available to child processes.

Repository Security

To keep environment variables secure, ensure .env is ignored by version control:

echo ".env" >> .gitignore

This prevents accidentally committing sensitive information to your repository.

Print environments activated for a specific PID

MY_PID=$$ \
&& cat /proc/$MY_PID/environ