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pythonubuntuflaskservice

Set a system environment variable

I have a flask server running and I can not get it to run as a service without it dumping all the environment variables.

Here is my config that is supposed to use sqlite if there is no DATABASE_URL environment variable. It works everytime unless I run it as a service at which point it never works.

#SQL Alchemy Database config
if os.environ.get('DATABASE_URL') is None:
    print('Using SQLITE')
    SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS = False
    SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = ('sqlite:///' + os.path.join(basedir, 'app.db') + '?check_same_thread=False')
else:
    print('Using MySQL')
    SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = os.environ.get('DATABASE_URL')
    SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS = False
    #SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = ('mysql+pymysql://username:password@localhost/20200830MYSQL')
    #export DATABASE_URL="mysql+pymysql://username:password@localhost/20200830MYSQL"

Placing it in /etc/environment works for when I manually run, but not the service. Here is /etc/environment

DATABASE_URL="mysql+pymysql://username:password@localhost/20200830MYSQL"

Doing the following command in a terminal does not work for my service as well.

export DATABASE_URL="mysql+pymysql://username:password@localhost/20200830MYSQL"

I've also placed it in the server.service file in /etc/systemd/systemand it does not work still. Here is the server.service file:

[Unit]
Description=Server
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
DATABASE_URL="mysql+pymysql://username:password@localhost/20200830MYSQL"
WorkingDirectory=/home/jon/server
ExecStart=/home/jon/server/env/bin/gunicorn -k gevent -b 0.0.0.0:5080 app:app
Restart=always

[Install]
RequiredBy = multi-user.target
Solution

  • As detailed here I needed to correct some syntax when I placed the variable into the server.service. Here is the syntax I used.

    [Service]
Environment="SECRET=pGNqduRFkB4K9C2vijOmUDa2kPtUhArN"