Accessing direnv environment variables in a Jupyter notebook

I use direnv to manage my shell environment for projects. When using a Jupyter notebook within a project, I realized that the environment variables in my .envrc file were not being made available to my notebooks. The following worked for me as a low-effort way to load my environment into the notebook in a way that wouldn’t risk secrets being committed to source control, since I gitignore the .envrc file.

The code below assumes an .envrc file exists in the project root, containing

export MY_VAR="test_val"

Let’s run the example

%pip install python_dotenv

import os
print(f"value: {os.environ.get("MY_VAR")}")

value: None

from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv("./.envrc")
print(f"value after dotenv load: {os.environ.get("MY_VAR")}")

value after dotenv load: test_val

Quick and easy!