[python] How to set env variable in Jupyter notebook

I've a problem that Jupyter can't see env variable in bashrc file, is there a way to load these variables in jupyter or add custome variable to it?

If you are using systemd I just found out that you seem to have to add them to the systemd unit file. This on Ubuntu 16. Putting them into the .profile and .bashrc (even the /etc/profile) resulted in the ENV Vars not being available in the juypter notebooks.

I had to edit:

/lib/systemd/system/jupyer-notebook.service

and put in the variable i wanted to read in the unit file like:

Environment=MYOWN_VAR=theVar

and only then could I read it from within juypter notebook.

You can also set the variables in your kernel.json file:

My solution is useful if you need the same environment variables every time you start a jupyter kernel, especially if you have multiple sets of environment variables for different tasks.

To create a new ipython kernel with your environment variables, do the following:

• Read the documentation at https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/stable/kernels.html#kernel-specs
• Run jupyter kernelspec list to see a list with installed kernels and where the files are stored.
• Copy the directory that contains the kernel.json (e.g. named python2) to a new directory (e.g. python2_myENV).
• Change the display_name in the new kernel.json file.
• Add a env dictionary defining the environment variables.

Your kernel json could look like this (I did not modify anything from the installed kernel.json except display_name and env):

{
 "display_name": "Python 2 with environment",
 "language": "python",
 "argv": [
  "/usr/bin/python2",
  "-m",
  "ipykernel_launcher",
  "-f",
  "{connection_file}"
 ],
 "env": {"LD_LIBRARY_PATH":""}
}

Use cases and advantages of this approach

• In my use-case, I wanted to set the variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH which effects how compiled modules (e.g. written in C) are loaded. Setting this variable using %set_env did not work.
• I can have multiple python kernels with different environments.
• To change the environment, I only have to switch/ restart the kernel, but I do not have to restart the jupyter instance (useful, if I do not want to loose the variables in another notebook). See -however - https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/2647

A gotcha I ran into: The following two commands are equivalent. Note the first cannot use quotes. Somewhat counterintuitively, quoting the string when using %env VAR ... will result in the quotes being included as part of the variable's value, which is probably not what you want.

%env MYPATH=C:/Folder Name/file.txt

and

import os
os.environ['MYPATH'] = "C:/Folder Name/file.txt"

If you're using Python, you can define your environment variables in a .env file and load them from within a Jupyter notebook using python-dotenv.

Install python-dotenv:

pip install python-dotenv

Load the .env file in a Jupyter notebook:

%load_ext dotenv
%dotenv

You can setup environment variables in your code as follows:

import sys,os,os.path
sys.path.append(os.path.expanduser('~/code/eol_hsrl_python'))
os.environ['HSRL_INSTRUMENT']='gvhsrl'
os.environ['HSRL_CONFIG']=os.path.expanduser('~/hsrl_config')

This if of course a temporary fix, to get a permanent one, you probably need to export the variables into your ~.profile, more information can be found here

If you need the variable set before you're starting the notebook, the only solution which worked for me was env VARIABLE=$VARIABLE jupyter notebook with export VARIABLE=value in .bashrc.

In my case tensorflow needs the exported variable for successful importing it in a notebook.

A related (short-term) solution is to store your environment variables in a single file, with a predictable format, that can be sourced when starting a terminal and/or read into the notebook. For example, I have a file, .env, that has my environment variable definitions in the format VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE (no blank lines or extra spaces). You can source this file in the .bashrc or .bash_profile files when beginning a new terminal session and you can read this into a notebook with something like,

import os
env_vars = !cat ../script/.env
for var in env_vars:
    key, value = var.split('=')
    os.environ[key] = value

I used a relative path to show that this .env file can live anywhere and be referenced relative to the directory containing the notebook file. This also has the advantage of not displaying the variable values within your code anywhere.