Integrate EnvKey with your Python projects to keep API keys, credentials, and other configuration securely and automatically in sync for developers and servers.

Compatible with Python 2 and 3.

$ pip install envkey

If you haven't already, download and install EnvKey from our website, then create a new org. Next, follow the ~1 minute integration quickstart to init an app with a .envkey file (for connecting development) or generate a server ENVKEY (for connecting a server).

Then at the entry point of your application:

import envkey

For Django, you should put the above in manage.py and wsgi.py. Also see the note on casting below if you're migrating from django-environ.

Now all your EnvKey variables will be available in os.environ.

Or as a bit of syntactic sugar to avoid needing to always import os alongside envkey, you can call envkey.get, which delegates to os.environ.get. For example:

import envkey

my_var = envkey.get("SOME_ENVKEY_VAR")

The package will throw an error if an ENVKEY is missing or invalid.

This package will not overwrite existing environment variables or additional variables set in the .env file you loaded your ENVKEY from. This can be convenient for customizing environments that otherwise share the same configuration. You can also use branches or local overrides for this purpose.

This package can cache your encrypted config in development so that you can still use it while offline. Your config will still be available (though possibly not up-to-date) the next time you lose your internet connection. If you do have a connection available, envkey will always load the latest config. Your cached encrypted config is stored in $HOME/.envkey/cache

To turn on caching, set a ENVKEY_SHOULD_CACHE=1 environment variable when running your program (not in your EnvKey config):

ENVKEY_SHOULD_CACHE=1 python your_app.py

If you'd like to have more control over how your config is loaded, you can prevent the package from auto-loading on import by setting ENVKEY_DISABLE_AUTOLOAD=1 as an environment variable when running your program.

You can then load your config explicitly like this:

import envkey

envkey.load(cache_enabled=True)

For even more flexibility, you can just fetch your config as a dict (without setting it on os.environ) like this:

import envkey
import os

config = envkey.fetch_env(os.environ['ENVKEY'], cache_enabled=True)

If you happen to be migrating from django-environ to EnvKey, watch out for the fact that EnvKey does not cast variables to booleans or any other non-string types as django-environ does. All variables set by EnvKey will be strings in accordance with the cross-platform environment variable standard. See: https://twitter.com/manishsinhaha/status/1265746057377361921

Using a language-specific library like this one is the easiest and fastest method of integrating with EnvKey. That said, the envkey-source executable, which this library wraps, provides additional options and functionality when used directly from the command line. If you need additional flexibility and it works for your use case, consider using envkey-source directly.

On a stripped down OS like Alpine Linux, you may get an x509: certificate signed by unknown authority error when attempting to load your config. envkey-source tries to handle this by including its own set of trusted CAs via gocertifi, but if you're getting this error anyway, you can fix it by ensuring that the ca-certificates dependency is installed. On Alpine you'll want to run:

apk add --no-cache ca-certificates

For more on EnvKey in general:

Read the docs.

Read the integration quickstart.

Read the security and cryptography overview.

Post an issue, start a discussion, or email us: support@envkey.com.