Working with Environment Variables

This guide explains how to work with environment variables in sfs-settings.

Basic Usage

Environment variables are a common way to configure applications. sfs-settings makes them easy to use:

from sfs_settings import set_env_var_locally

# Set DATABASE_URL from environment variable
set_env_var_locally("DATABASE_URL")

# Now you can use DATABASE_URL directly
print(f"Connecting to {DATABASE_URL}")

Type Conversion

Environment variables are always strings, but you can convert them to the right type:

# Convert PORT to an integer
set_env_var_locally("PORT", conversion_function=int)

# Convert DEBUG to a boolean
def to_bool(value):
    return value.lower()[0] in ("y", "t", "1")

set_env_var_locally("DEBUG", conversion_function=to_bool)

Working with .env Files

sfs-settings automatically loads variables from .env files in the current directory:

.env file

DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@localhost/db
DEBUG=true
PORT=5000