///

An environment variable (also known as "**env var**") is a variable that lives **outside** of the Python code, in the **operating system**, and could be read by your Python code (or by other programs as well).

Environment variables could be useful for handling application **settings**, as part of the **installation** of Python, etc.

## Create and Use Env Vars { #create-and-use-env-vars }

And then, you could give that JWT token to a user (or bot), and they could use it to perform those actions (drive the car, or edit the blog post) without even needing to have an account, just with the JWT token your API generated for that.

Using these ideas, JWT can be used for way more sophisticated scenarios.

In those cases, several of those entities could have the same ID, let's say `foo` (a user `foo`, a car `foo`, and a blog post `foo`).

This client could be a browser with a frontend, a code from someone else, an IoT device, etc.

You could need to tell the client that:

* The client doesn't have enough privileges for that operation.
* The client doesn't have access to that resource.
* The item the client was trying to access doesn't exist.
* etc.

///

## Use Cases { #use-cases }

You could use this if you want to stream pure strings, for example directly from the output of an **AI LLM** service.

You could also use it to stream **large binary files**, where you stream each chunk of data as you read it, without having to read it all in memory at once.

You could also stream **video** or **audio** this way, it could even be generated as you process and send it.

So, you could add additional data to the automatically generated schema.

For example, you could decide to read and validate the request with your own code, without using the automatic features of FastAPI with Pydantic, but you could still want to define the request in the OpenAPI schema.

You could do that with `openapi_extra`:

If you use a `requirements.txt` file you could specify the version with:

```txt
fastapi[standard]==0.112.0
```

that would mean that you would use exactly the version `0.112.0`.

Or you could also pin it with:

```txt
fastapi[standard]>=0.112.0,<0.113.0
```

For example, you could declare that something could be a `str` or `None`:

```python
from typing import Union


def say_hi(name: Union[str, None]):
        print(f"Hi {name}!")
```

`typing` also has a shortcut to declare that something could be `None`, with `Optional`.

Here's a tip from my very **subjective** point of view:

///

And then the `admin_email` setting would be set to `"******@****.***"`.

The `app_name` would be `"ChimichangApp"`.

And the `items_per_user` would keep its default value of `50`.

## Settings in another module { #settings-in-another-module }

# OpenAPI Callbacks { #openapi-callbacks }

You could create an API with a *path operation* that could trigger a request to an *external API* created by someone else (probably the same developer that would be *using* your API).

Now, let's see how you could use that to return a custom response.

Let's say that you want to return an [XML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML) response.

You could put your XML content in a string, put that in a `Response`, and return it: