Environment Variables in RStudio on Mac
I recently asked a question on Stack Overflow on the best way to set environment variables on a Mac for use within an RStudio session.
It wasn’t as straightforward as I would have thought, so I wanted to share this quick post as a way to remind my future self of a quick way to solve the issue.
Overview
Generally, you can set environment variables by:
export YOUR_VAR=abc123
within a terminal. In a new session,
echo $YOUR_VAR
should yield what you need.
Within python, you can get at it by:
import os
os.getenv("YOUR_VAR")
but if you are using R and Rstudio, Sys.getenv("YOUR_VAR") will return "".
No bueno.
A solution
Navigate to ~, and create the .Renviron file if it doesn’t already exist
cd ~
touch .Renviron
open .Renviron
And in the file, type
YOUR_VAR="abc123"
Save the file and restart/reopen Rstudio.
From there, Sys.getenv("YOUR_VAR") should be good to go.
Deeper Dive
For a more granular look at this functionality, feel free to reference the links below
