How to see and set your environment variables

Print all your current environment variables with 

$ printenv

See a the value for a specific variable with echo

$ printenv <YOUR_VARIABLE> or $ echo $<YOUR_VARIABLE>

For example:

$ printenv MY_API_KEY or $ echo $MY_API_KEY

How do I set the variable temporarily?

This will set your variable for ONLY your current shell session

$ export <YOUR_VARIABLE>=some-secret-pattern

You can also prepend values to a currently set variable

$ export <YOUR_VARIABLE>=some-secret-pattern:$<YOUR_VARIABLE>

This is why you see export PATH statements like this

export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH

This is actually prepending /usr/local/mysql/bin to the existing PATH

How do I set the variable permanently?

You can run the same start up export command with every shell session if you put this in your .bash_profile

export <YOUR_VARIABLE>=some-secret-pattern

* Make sure you source your bash_profile to see the changes

$ source ~/.bash_profile

How do I see it in my code?

Using your node shell:

node> console.log(process.env)

Using your python shell

python> import os; print os.environ