Env-cmd

A simple wrapper for executing virtualenv commands and passing them environment variables via a config file.

Use case

Let's say you deploy a Django site named "example.com". You follow all the best practices and deploy it as a Python package, installed in an isolated virtualenv at /usr/share/python/example-com (as dh_virtualenv would do).

Configuration is read from environment variables in the Django settings.

When you want to run a Django management command on your server, you would type:

ENV_VAR_1=value ENV_VAR_2=other … /usr/share/python/example-com/bin/django-admin <command>

You could use envdir or bash's source command to expose your environment variables, but Env-cmd eases that further. It allows you to read a configuration file, expose values in the environment and run a command simply by adding a setuptools entry point in your setup.py. With the entry point symlinked to /usr/bin, your command becomes:

example-com django-admin <command>

Env-cmd:

• Reads a configuration file using the default location provided, or an override.
• Exposes configuration values as environment variables.
• Resolves the path of your virtualenv.
• Shells out to the virtualenv command.

Installation

pip install env-cmd

Usage

In <yourproject>/cli.py:

import env_cmd

read_environ = env_cmd.read_environ(
    'PRCONFIG',  # name of the env var that allows overriding of the
                 # config path.
    '/etc/yourproject.conf', # default config path.
    {'SOME_ENV_VARIABLE': 'DEFAULT_VALUE', # Some default environment
     'OTHER_VARIABLE': 'OTHER VALUE'},     # variables.
)
main = env_cmd.main(read_environ)

In your setup.py:

setup(
    …
    entry_points={'console_scripts': ['yourproject=yourproject.cli:main']},
)

Then symlink /path/to/virtualenv/bin/yourproject to /usr/bin/yourproject.

You can run a command from your virtualenv with:

yourproject <command>

Override the default config path with:

PRCONFIG=/path/to/config.conf yourproject <command>

Configuration syntax is the following:

KEY=value
OTHER=some other value
QUOTED="quotes are stripped."
ALSO='single quotes too'
WHITESPACE=    is stripped as well.
# comments work like this

# empty lines are skipped

If you run a web server with Gunicorn, you can use the on_reload hook to read configuration on server reload, allowing zero-downtime configuration updates:

# gunicorn.conf.py
import os

from yourproject import read_environ

def on_reload(server):
    server.log.info("Reading environ")
    os.environ = read_environ()
    server.log.info(os.environ)