Environment Variables

System specific variables (e.g. absolute paths) should not be under version control, otherwise there will be conflicts between different users.

The best way to handle system specific variables is through environment variables.

You can define new environment variables in a .env file in the project root. A copy of this file (e.g. .env.template) can be under version control to ease new project configurations.

To define a new variable write inside .env:

export MY_VAR=/home/user/my_system_path

You can dynamically resolve the variable name from everywhere

pythonyamlposix

In Python code use:

get_env("MY_VAR")

In the Hydra yaml configurations:

${oc.env:MY_VAR}

In posix shells:

. .env
echo $MY_VAR