dedicated environment file

[rhwendt]

I was following the installation guide setting up the systemd files and I ran into some some issues with environment variables. Adding additional environment variables to ~/.bashrc using the export didn't load these in at runtime. This caused the service not to start because the database password was an empty string. This is because even though we had User=nautobot in the service definition, the service is ran as the root user.

One solution was to manually input these in nautobot_config.py, however I'm not a fan of storing passwords in config files like this.
I know this topic is a big discussion itself :)

I worked around this by adding a dedicated .env file. This allows the nautobot user and the service to have access to the same environment variables.

switch to nautobot user

sudo -iu nautobot

add NAUTOBOT_ROOT to env file

echo "NAUTOBOT_ROOT=/opt/nautobot" > .nautobot_env

change permissions so only nautobot can access it

chmod 600 .nautobot_env

add at the bottom of ~/.bashrc

if [ -f ~/.nautobot_env ]; then
 source ~/.nautobot_env
 export $(cut -d= -f1 ~/.nautobot_env)
fi

add any other env variables to this file specified in nautobot_config.py

nautobot@nautobot-test:~$ cat .nautobot_env
NAUTOBOT_ROOT=/opt/nautobot
NAUTOBOT_ALLOWED_HOSTS="localhost 127.0.0.1"
NAUTOBOT_DB_NAME=nautobot
NAUTOBOT_DB_USER=nautobot
NAUTOBOT_DB_PASSWORD=<redacted>
NAUTOBOT_SECRET_KEY=<redacted>
NAUTOBOT_NAPALM_USERNAME=user1
NAUTOBOT_NAPALM_PASSWORD=<redacted>

log out of the nautobot user and edit the systemd service

exit
sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/nautobot.service

edit the service - Replace Environment with EnvironmentFile

EnvironmentFile=/opt/nautobot/.nautobot_env

reload the systemd daemon

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

switch to nautobot user and test that the environment variables are working

sudo -iu nautobot

nautobot@nautobot-test:~$ echo $NAUTOBOT_ALLOWED_HOSTS
localhost 127.0.0.1
nautobot@nautobot-test:~$

[rhwendt]

Just as an update this needs to be changed on the worker and scheduler systemd files as well.