If you're working with third party APIs, you might find code like YOUR_SECRET_KEY="some secret api key" in your source code, this is a bad practices for a lot of reasons (security, source code sharing, etc). Instead, the recommended way to manage this kind of situation is to add the value as a enviroment variable, and read it in your code with something like this:

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import os
os.environ.get('YOUR_SECRET_KEY')

So, how do you avoid to add the variable to the enviroment each time you do some coding? If you're working with virtualenv you simply add it in the env/bin/activate script:

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YOUR_SECRET_KEY="some secret api key"
export YOUR_SECRET_KEY