Python - temporarily modify the current process's environment

Question

I use the following code to temporarily modify environment variables.

@contextmanager
def _setenv(**mapping):
    """``with`` context to temporarily modify the environment variables"""
    backup_values = {}
    backup_remove = set()
    for key, value in mapping.items():
        if key in os.environ:
            backup_values[key] = os.environ[key]
        else:
            backup_remove.add(key)
        os.environ[key] = value

    try:
        yield
    finally:
        # restore old environment
        for k, v in backup_values.items():
            os.environ[k] = v
        for k in backup_remove:
            del os.environ[k]

This with context is mainly used in test cases. For example,

def test_myapp_respects_this_envvar():
    with _setenv(MYAPP_PLUGINS_DIR='testsandbox/plugins'):
        myapp.plugins.register()
        [...]

My question: is there a simple/elegant way to write _setenv? I thought about actually doing backup = os.environ.copy() and then os.environ = backup .. but I am not sure if that would affect the program behavior (eg: if os.environ is referenced elsewhere in the Python interpreter).

Answer 1

_environ = dict(os.environ)

...

os.environ.clear()
os.environ.update(_environ)