You may need to consider some further aspects for code robustness;

when you're storing an integer-valued variable as an environment variable, try

os.environ['DEBUSSY'] = str(myintvariable)

then for retrieval, consider that to avoid errors, you should try

os.environ.get('DEBUSSY', 'Not Set')

possibly substitute '-1' for 'Not Set'

so, to put that all together

myintvariable = 1
os.environ['DEBUSSY'] = str(myintvariable)
strauss = int(os.environ.get('STRAUSS', '-1'))
# NB KeyError <=> strauss = os.environ['STRAUSS']
debussy = int(os.environ.get('DEBUSSY', '-1'))

print "%s %u, %s %u" % ('Strauss', strauss, 'Debussy', debussy)

There is a workaround to what you want to achieve. Assuming you use bash as your shell, you can write the changes to bash initialization files(I chose ~/.bashrc):

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
os.system('bash -c \'echo "export a=100000" >> ~/.bashrc\'')
os.system('bash -c \'source ~/.bashrc\'')

You need to prepend bash -c, since python uses sh as the default shell.

Idea derived from a similar question on SO(different from the one falconer posted).

You don't need to use subprocess.

Read lines and split environment variable name, value and assign it to os.environ:

import os

with open('/home/user/env_script.env') as f:
    for line in f:
        if 'export' not in line:
            continue
        if line.startswith('#'):
            continue
        # Remove leading `export `
        # then, split name / value pair
        key, value = line.replace('export ', '', 1).strip().split('=', 1)
        os.environ[key] = value

or using dict.update and generator expression:

with open('env_script.env') as f:
    os.environ.update(
        line.replace('export ', '', 1).strip().split('=', 1) for line in f
        if 'export' in line
    )

Alternatively, you can make a wrapper shell script, which sources the env_script.env, then execute the original python file.

#!/bin/bash
source /home/user/env_script.env
python /path/to/original_script.py

1. PYTHONPATH is an environment variable
2. Yes (see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24802/on-which-unix-distributions-is-python-installed-as-part-of-the-default-install)
3. /usr/lib/python2.7 on Ubuntu
4. you shouldn't install packages manually. Instead, use pip. When a package isn't in pip, it usually has a setuptools setup script which will install the package into the proper location (see point 3).
5. if you use pip or setuptools, then you don't need to set PYTHONPATH explicitly

If you look at the instructions for pyopengl, you'll see that they are consistent with points 4 and 5.

There are many good answers here but you should avoid at all cost to pass untrusted variables to subprocess using shell=True as this is a security risk. The variables can escape to the shell and run arbitrary commands! If you just can't avoid it at least use python3's shlex.quote() to escape the string (if you have multiple space-separated arguments, quote each split instead of the full string).

shell=False is always the default where you pass an argument array.

Now the safe solutions...

Method #1

Change your own process's environment - the new environment will apply to python itself and all subprocesses.

os.environ['LD_LIBRARY_PATH'] = 'my_path'
command = ['sqsub', '-np', var1, '/homedir/anotherdir/executable']
subprocess.check_call(command)

Method #2

Make a copy of the environment and pass is to the childen. You have total control over the children environment and won't affect python's own environment.

myenv = os.environ.copy()
myenv['LD_LIBRARY_PATH'] = 'my_path'
command = ['sqsub', '-np', var1, '/homedir/anotherdir/executable']
subprocess.check_call(command, env=myenv)

Method #3

Unix only: Execute env to set the environment variable. More cumbersome if you have many variables to modify and not portabe, but like #2 you retain full control over python and children environments.

command = ['env', 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=my_path', 'sqsub', '-np', var1, '/homedir/anotherdir/executable']
subprocess.check_call(command)

Of course if var1 contain multiple space-separated argument they will now be passed as a single argument with spaces. To retain original behavior with shell=True you must compose a command array that contain the splitted string:

command = ['sqsub', '-np'] + var1.split() + ['/homedir/anotherdir/executable']

if you want to do it and set them up forever into a user account you can use setx but if you want as global you can use setx /M but for that you might need elevation, (i am using windows as example, (for linux you can see the other post where they store the value into the bash file )

import subprocess
if os.name == 'nt':  # if is in windows
    exp = 'setx hi2 "youAsWell"'
subprocess.Popen(exp, shell=True).wait()

after running that you can go to the environments and see how they been added into my user environments