Gunicorn service can't read environment variables

Posted on March 2, 2017

I am having some troubles to configure a Django app (using virtualenv) with Postgres, Nginx, and Gunicorn on Ubuntu 16.04.

Everything worked fine until I started setting some environment variables for some Django configuration variables. Ex.: SECRET_KEY = os.environ[‘DJANGO_SECRET_KEY’].

I have tried a lot of options like setting variables on virtualenv’s activate file, setting variables on ubuntu, and on gunicorn.service file but nothing is working.

Does anyone know how to work on this issue? How to set the environment variables?

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Kamal Nasser

February 5, 2018

This question was answered by @kameruchi:

Hi! Instead of adding the variables to the gunicorn command line, you could load them through a file: <on gunicorn.service> [Service] … EnvironmentFile=/path_to_/some_file_with_secrets … This should make the trick. (dont forget to create the file with those secrets)

View the original comment