Pipenv: Multiple Environments

Question

Right now I'm using virtualenv and just switching over to Pipenv. Today in virtualenv I load in different environment variables and settings depending on whether I'm in development, production, or testingby setting DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to myproject.settings.development, myproject.settings.production, and myproject.settings.testing.

I'm aware that I can set an .env file, but how can I have multiple versions of that .env file?

Answer 1

I'm far from a Python guru, but one solution I can think of would be to create Pipenv scripts that run shell scripts to change the PIPENV_DOTENV_LOCATION and run your startup commands.

Example Pipfile scripts:

[scripts]
development = "./scripts/development.sh"

development.sh Example:

#!/bin/sh
PIPENV_DOTENV_LOCATION=/path/to/.development_env pipenv run python test.py

Then run pipenv run development

Answer 2

You should create different .env files with different prefixes depending on the environment, such as production.env or testing.env. With pipenv, you can use the PIPENV_DONT_LOAD_ENV=1 environment variable to prevent pipenv shell from automatically exporting the .env file and combine this with export $(cat .env | xargs).

export $(cat production.env | xargs) && PIPENV_DONT_LOAD_ENV=1 pipenv shell would configure your environment variables for production and then start a shell in the virtual environment.

• gented: There is no need to export $(cat .env | xargs): one can just specify what "version" of the environment variables file to load as specified here: pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced/…. In the case at hand one could do PIPENV_DOTENV_LOCATION=prod.env/test.env pipenv shell. The advantage of this approach is that your env variables aren't kept in the shell upon exiting, which otherwise would be the case in your example.
• mtraceur: Besides the previous comment about using PIPENV_DOTENV_LOCATION, and the brokeness in the presence of characters which would cause field splitting, globbing, and so on, you can also simplify this method to just: $(cat .env | xargs) PIPENV_DONT_LOAD_ENV=1 pipenv shell, and thereby avoid leaking exported variables into all commands after this one.
• mtraceur: Actually I got so focused on my prior points that I totally forgot that I think you can simplify this further: you don't need | xargs at all, because in Bourne-like shells newlines in substituted output will work just like spaces - they cause field splitting (unless you've messed with your shell's field splitting, such as by setting the IFS variable), but they will never be treated as statement separators.