# Global variables | Modal Docs

- **URL:** https://modal.com/docs/guide/global-variables
- **Summary:** Handle global variables and data in Modal Functions using modal.is_local to differentiate local and cloud execution.

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Global variables
================

There are cases where you might want objects or data available in **global** scope. For example:

*   You need to use the data in a scheduled function (scheduled functions don’t accept arguments)
*   You need to construct objects (e.g. Secrets) in global scope to use as function annotations
*   You don’t want to clutter many function signatures with some common arguments they all use, and pass the same arguments through many layers of function calls.

For these cases, you can use the `modal.is_local` function, which returns `True` if the app is running locally (initializing) or `False` if the app is executing in the cloud.

For instance, to create a [`modal.Secret`](https://modal.com/docs/guide/secrets)
 that you can pass to your function decorators to create environment variables, you can run:

    import os
    
    if modal.is_local():
        pg_password = modal.Secret.from_dict({"PGPASS": os.environ["MY_LOCAL_PASSWORD"]})
    else:
        pg_password = modal.Secret.from_dict({})
    
    
    @app.function(secrets=[pg_password])
    def get_secret_data():
        connection = psycopg2.connect(password=os.environ["PGPASS"])
        ...

Warning about regular module globals 

If you try to construct a global in module scope using some local data _without_ using something like `modal.is_local`, it might have unexpected effects since your Python modules will be not only be loaded on your local machine, but also on the remote worker.

E.g., this will typically not work:

    # blob.json doesn't exist on the remote worker, so this will cause an error there
    data_blob = open("blob.json", "r").read()
    
    @app.function()
    def foo():
        print(data_blob)

[Global variables](https://modal.com/docs/guide/global-variables#global-variables)
[Warning about regular module globals](https://modal.com/docs/guide/global-variables#warning-about-regular-module-globals)