Using GitHub secrets in a local environment

[SimplyClueless]

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So I am trying to setup GitHub actions to do some automation things at home until i have the capabilities to run them locally on a home lab type setup and have been using GitHub Action Secrets, and subsequently Codespaces for coding along with Codespaces secrets, for things like API keys and passkeys. I want to try and move away from Codespaces to not incur any billing time for using the service, and instead go back to using my ide locally on my computer, but I can't seem to find a way to locally get the GitHub secrets to keep the same code that I already have setup. Am I able to locally create environment variables that are the same as the secret values that don't get pushed to GitHub via something like a .gitignore file? I don't want to have to change code each time I am testing locally, but I don't want to continue using Codespaces unless I am working on my iPad (which is rarely)

[jfullstackdev]

it seems you are referring to .env ?

1. create .env, put secrets there
2. add .env to .gitignore, this way it is never pushed to GitHub, to avoid sharing the secret
3. load it with dotenv (or similar) locally, depending on tech stack you use

[SimplyClueless]

Ah ok I see now I never knew about env variables or such. I'm guessing they would be formatted and named the same as how they are in my action .yml file, but of course, just housing the key locally to be used. The problem now then comes from having to use the python-dotenv package how how the imports there are different to how the github ones work

[jfullstackdev]

maybe like this, but I'm not so sure of your setup

---

1. create a .env file (ignored by git)

# .env
API_KEY=super_secret_key
DB_PASSWORD=another_secret

make sure .env is in your .gitignore:

.env

---

2. load environment variables locally with python-dotenv

install :

pip install python-dotenv

at the entry point of your app (e.g., main.py):

from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os

# Load .env file
load_dotenv()

# Access like normal env vars
api_key = os.getenv("API_KEY")
db_password = os.getenv("DB_PASSWORD")

print(api_key, db_password)

---

3. match GitHub Actions secrets

in GitHub Actions, you’d use secrets like:

env:
  API_KEY: ${{ secrets.API_KEY }}
  DB_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.DB_PASSWORD }}

so if you name the variables the same in your .env file, your code won’t need to change whether you’re running locally or in Actions — both resolve os.getenv("API_KEY") etc.

---

this way:

• Locally → .env + python-dotenv
• GitHub Actions → secrets.* injected automatically

no code changes needed between local + CI/CD environments

[github-actions[bot]]

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