Pycharm: set environment variable for run manage.py Task

Because Pycharm is not launching from a terminal, your environment will not be loaded. In short, any GUI program will not inherit the SHELL variables. See this for reasons (assuming a Mac).

However, there are several basic solutions to this problem. As @user3228589 posted, you can set this up as a variable within PyCharm. This has several pros and cons. I personally don’t like this approach because it’s not a single source. To fix this, I use a small function at the top of my settings.py file which looks up the variable inside a local .env file. I put all of my “private” stuff in there. I also can reference this in my virtualenv.

Here is what it looks like.

— settings.py

def get_env_variable(var_name, default=False):
    """
    Get the environment variable or return exception
    :param var_name: Environment Variable to lookup
    """
    try:
        return os.environ[var_name]
    except KeyError:
        import StringIO
        import ConfigParser
        env_file = os.environ.get('PROJECT_ENV_FILE', SITE_ROOT + "/.env")
        try:
            config = StringIO.StringIO()
            config.write("[DATA]\n")
            config.write(open(env_file).read())
            config.seek(0, os.SEEK_SET)
            cp = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
            cp.readfp(config)
            value = dict(cp.items('DATA'))[var_name.lower()]
            if value.startswith('"') and value.endswith('"'):
                value = value[1:-1]
            elif value.startswith("'") and value.endswith("'"):
                value = value[1:-1]
            os.environ.setdefault(var_name, value)
            return value
        except (KeyError, IOError):
            if default is not False:
                return default
            from django.core.exceptions import ImproperlyConfigured
            error_msg = "Either set the env variable '{var}' or place it in your " \
                        "{env_file} file as '{var} = VALUE'"
            raise ImproperlyConfigured(error_msg.format(var=var_name, env_file=env_file))

# Make this unique, and don't share it with anybody.
SECRET_KEY = get_env_variable('SECRET_KEY')

Then the env file looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This should normally be placed in the ${SITE_ROOT}/.env
#
# DEPLOYMENT DO NOT MODIFY THESE..
SECRET_KEY='XXXSECRETKEY'

And finally your virtualenv/bin/postactivate can source this file. You could go further and export the variables as described here if you’d like, but since settings file directly calls the .env, there isn’t really a need.