EnvironmentVariables.md

AWS Environment Variables

NOTE. Feel free to skip this document until you have deployed your Lambda (check the AWS HOWTO for more details on how to properly set up your AWS environment first and then follow the instructions from the README to finally deploy your Lambda). But once your Lambda has been successfully deployed, make sure to return back to this document for some extra configuration tweaks.

Unfortunately, Zappa does not have a good way to pass environment variables to your Lambdas. Of course, the aws_environment_variables setting allows us to use native AWS Lambda environment variables. These are useful as you can easily change them via the AWS Lambda console at run-time. They are also useful for storing sensitive credentials and to take advantage of KMS encryption of environment variables.

The main problem with aws_environment_variables is that environment variables have to be hard-coded into the configuration file, and this is not acceptable.

Example:

{
    "dev": {
        "aws_environment_variables": {
            "key_1": "value_1",
            "key_2": "value_2",
            "key_3": "value_3",
            ...
        }
    }
}

So a better solution is to set environment variables via the AWS Lambda console directly. The process itself is quite easy and can be done by going through the following steps:

1. Go to the AWS Lambda console.
2. Select the Functions tab.
3. Find your Lambda and go to the corresponding configuration page.
4. Set your key-value pairs in the Environment variables section.
5. Click the Save button.

Thus, you can securely store your environment variables and dynamically change them at run-time without having to re-deploy anything.