Credentials in pip.conf for private PyPI

How about storing the Username/Password as environment variables,

export username=username
export password=password

and referring to them in the pip.conf like so:

[global]
index = https://$username:[email protected]/pypi
index-url = https://$username:[email protected]/simple
cert = /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

I use Gitlab CI's secret variables for storing credentials. Check for an equivalent in your CI tool.

You could store credentials for Pip to use in ~/.netrc like this:

machine pypi.example.com
    login johndoe
    password changeme

Pip will use these credentials when accessing https://pypi.example.com but won't log them. You must specify the index server separately (such as in pip.conf as in the question).

Note that ~/.netrc must be owned by the user pip executes as. It must not be readable by any other user, either. An invalid file is silently ignored. You can ensure the permissions are correct like this:

chown $USER ~/.netrc
chmod 0600 ~/.netrc

This permissions check doesn't apply before Python 3.4, but it's a good idea in any case.

Internally Pip uses requests when making HTTP requests. requests uses the standard library netrc module to read the file, so the character set is limited to an ASCII subset.