Updated environment variable but os.getenv() keeps returning None [closed]

Question

I can't seem to get my code to respond to custom environment variables so I wrote a piece of code to test it. os.getenv is not pulling the environment variables that I've set in BASH into my Python code.

$ FRUSTRATION="PYTHON!!"
$ echo $FRUSTRATION
PYTHON!!
$ ipython
In [1]: import os

In [2]: very_frustrated = os.getenv("FRUSTRATION")

In [3]: print(very_frustrated)
None

Sized

This is not the code you ran. echo FRUSTRATION without a leading $ would repeat FRUSTRATION, not the contents of the variable. At a guess, you didn't actually export FRUSTRATION in the shell you launched ipython from. – Coz

Can't recreate this. Are you launching ipython from the same shell? – Vocable

Which operating system / shell? That doesn't look like any linux shell I know of. – Nabors

In many linux shells, !! is a shortcut for the previous command. If you simply meant it for emphasis, a different method would be good. – Nabors

Had a similar issue within Jupyter notebook. Just had to restart Jupyter (not just the kernel). – Selfaggrandizement

The issue is that the environment variable wasn't exported. You just need to write: export FRUSTRATION="PYTHON!!" and it will work. This is a duplicate of python - os.getenv and os.environ don't see environment variables of my bash shell. – Dupery

It can be that you set the variable in a different shell. For example setting the variable in zsh and then running the python script from bash the variable won't show up in os.environ – Veasey

Answer 1

Works for me:

:: export FOO=boo
:: python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jul 30 2016, 18:31:42)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 8.0.0 (clang-800.0.34)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.getenv('FOO')
'boo'
>>>

My guess is that you either forgot to export the variable, or you spelled the variable wrong.

Schorl

Answer 2

print os.environ

Do this to see if you have environment var added to you system or not. Your python code is fine. It's the problem setting env var.

Sabinasabine

I don't see how this is any better than just calling os.getenv. If its a problem setting the variable, this change doesn't help. – Nabors

@Nabors It would show the variables you could see, and potentially see the variable you're looking for--except the name might be spelled wrong or something of that nature. I happen to think it is a valuable debugging step, but it's not a real answer to the problem. – Schorl