Importing creating an environment variable in Python?

Question

This could be a silly question. I have code that calls a subprocess in Python. For it to work and find the program I will need to set an environment variable on my Mac TEST__LIB_PATH.

subprocess.call(["find_info",
                          image,
                          json_file])

Is there a way in Python I can just import this environment variable to use instead of having to set this up globally?

Answer 1

call takes a keyword argument env that takes a mapping to use as the environment for the command. The current environment is in os.environ ; you can extend that with something like

subprocess.call(["find_info", image, json_file],
                env=dict(TEST__LIB_PATH="/path/requried/for/test", 
                         **os.environ))

Answer 2

You can access environment variables with os.environ :

import os
print(os.environ['TEST__LIB_PATH'])

os.environ also has a get() method:

os.environ.get('TEST__LIB_PATH')

Edit : here's a link to the docs