How to store a Python dictionary as an Environment Variable

I don't know if this is what you were looking for, but I ended up here while trying to save a dictionary as a Linux environment variable to consume it on my app.

What I did was saving it as a string like this:

export BUILDING_ADMINS="{'+27792955555': 'De Wet','+27722855555': 'Marysol','+27878085555': 'Blomerus'}'

And then on your python code you read it and transform it into a dictionary using this (taken from: Convert a String representation of a Dictionary to a dictionary?):

import ast
import os

ba_dict = ast.literal_eval(os.environ["BUILDING_ADMINS"])

If you type

type(ba_dict)

You should see your string is now a dict.

<class 'dict'>

Hope this helps someone else!

An environment variable is not something a script user would like to set. Use the json module and a file:

import json

with open('numbers') as f:
    numbers = json.load(f)

print numbers['+27792955555']    #  De Wet

When pushing to GitHub don't commit the numbers file. Maybe commit an example one and add the real one to your .gitignore.

If you choose to use the environment, you should serialize the Python dictionary as JSON and dump/load that when setting/getting the environment variable. You can access the environment using os module's environ attribute. You can dump/load JSON using the json module. You might want to watch out for a maximum length on environment variables if there is such a thing.

If I were you I would use a sqlite database, see https://docs.python.org/2/library/sqlite3.html. This would give you persistence, a defined schema, and a nice interface for handling your data.