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Managing development .env in Django

Python-dotenv reads key-value pairs from a .env file and can set them as environment variables. It helps in the development of applications following the 12-factor principles.

$ pip install python-dotenv

Create a .env.example file in the root file.

.env.example

SECRET_KEY=
DB_NAME=
DB_USER=root
DB_PASS=
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306

while in development, copy and paste .env.example, new file called .env

.env

SECRET_KEY="your secret key inside quotes"
DB_NAME=db-name
DB_USER=root
DB_PASS=
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306

Update the settings.py file in project

settings.py

from dotenv import load_dotenv
from datetime import timedelta
import os

# load environment variables from a file named .env into the environment of your application.
load_dotenv()

# added
SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get('SECRET_KEY')


# updated the databse
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': os.environ.get('DB_NAME'),
        'USER': os.environ.get('DB_USER'),
        'PASSWORD': os.environ.get('DB_PASS'),
        'HOST': os.environ.get('DB_HOST'),
        'PORT': os.environ.get('DB_PORT'),
        'OPTIONS': {
            'init_command': "SET sql_mode='STRICT_TRANS_TABLES'",
        },
    }
}

That's it now you're good to go ;)

Reference