How to safely store database password in Python?

Question

In PHP, the accepted way to protect credentials for entering the database is to store them outside the root website and include() files with passwords. How secure are credentials for logging into a MySQL database in Python applications?

Answer 1

Well, one way to do this is to put the passwords in a separate config / ini file, which is not deployed with the project. Then pass the path of this file to the main input of the application, for example:

python main.py --config=/path/to/config.ini

Note that you need to parse this --config argument (see argparse ) and then read and parse the config.ini file.

Update : Since you mentioned web applications, there is another way to pass configuration information - via environ . For example, if you use mod_wsgi , you can putt this in wsgi directives:

SetEnv my_namespace.some_param some_value

And then this value will be available in the application using os.environ :

 import os os.environ['my_namespace.some_param']