Key management

Store a key in the environment (for one session):

export API_KEY="your-api-key"

To store a key across sessions, add the export API_KEY="your-api-key" statement to ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile.

Common key variables for local setup

export OPENAI_KEY=”XXX”
export GITHUB_TOKEN=”XXX”

Access the key in Python:

import os

api_key = os.environ.get('API_KEY')

Advantage: confidential keys are not saved in the script and not shared with others.