Protect your variables with .env

Using a .env file will enable you to use environment variables for local development without polluting the global environment namespace. It will also keep your environment variable names and values isolated to the same project that utilizes them.

A .env file is a text file containing key value pairs of all the environment variables required by your application. This file is included with your project locally but not saved to source control so that you aren't putting potentially sensitive information at risk.

# environment variables defined inside a .env file
GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project-id
SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE=path/to/serviceAccountCredentials
STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME=my-super-important-data

Nearly every programming language has a package or library that can be used to read environment variables from the .env file instead of from your local environment. For Python, that library is python-dotenv. Once the library is installed, an average use case for python-dotenv only requires adding two lines of code to your project.

pip install python-dotenv

in the python file 

import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()

GCP_PROJECT_ID = os.getenv('GCP_PROJECT_ID')
SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE = os.getenv('SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE')
STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = os.getenv('STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME')