I'm storing sensitive info like the auth token in environment variables. The problem is, the python script can only see them when I run the script manually from the shell (so I know that the code ...

You can save any R variable to a Python-friendly format with reticulate’s r_to_py() function, including environment variables: ...

Ubuntu is a free computer system, like Windows or macOS, but it’s built by a community. It’s great for programmers because it’s very flexible and has lots of tools already built-in that help you code.