Discussion on: Django Cheat Sheet: Keep Credentials Secure with Environment Variables

[Nicola Erario]

How do you manage Boolean with python-dotenv? I mean that ( for example)DEBUG = True or DEBUG = False in .env file are always evaluated as True

[James Timmins]

Yeah, that's an unfortunate drawback of dotenv. There's a couple of things you can do.

1. Explicitly check for a string value. DEBUG = (os.getenv("DEBUG") == 'true')
2. Cast the val to a boolean DEBUG = bool(os.getenv("DEBUG")), and use an empty string to denote a false value DEBUG=''.
3. Use a more fully-featured package like django-environ. There's slightly more configuration required, but if your project has multiple boolean settings it might be worth it. (I haven't actually used django-environ, but it looks pretty interesting so I may investigate).

[Bhupesh Varshney 👾]

thanks for this

[Thomas Güttler]

Don't ask my why the author did not accept my PR: github.com/theskumar/python-dotenv...

Converting types

The library reads and provides strings. If you need for example a boolean, it is up to you to convert the value.

Example:

from distutils.util import strtobool
DEBUG = bool(strtobool(os.getenv('DEBUG', 'True')))

[eftehassanpp]

Its simple. env always stores string in not only just python but also in javascript. simply parse the env value with json
import json
DEBUG = json.loads(os.getenv("DEBUG"))
if DEBUG:
print("Debugging")

[Ansh Saini]

Okay I'm surprised I didn't know that! Thanks. This'll save me some future headaches.

[Nicola Erario]

Sure! After time spent to True this, False that... and your app lives of it’s own life