[Python] Saving passwords for python script and virtual environment in Linux

I have a Python script that scrapes a website, stores some data into a Pandas data frame and emails the results as HTML. I'm running this manually, but now I'm trying to automate this. I have a Raspberry Pi that is always on for Open Media Vault.

This seemed like a good opportunity to learn more about cron jobs and Linux.

The main concerns I have are how to store my login credentials (which I currently have in a .env file), storing the pickle file that contains cookie data to avoid text message verification, and how to handle package installations (virtual env vs globally on the Linux OS).

For the passwords, 2 suggestions came up: manually setting them in ~/.bashrc as environment variables which I can bring in using os.getenv(); use chmod 600 to restrict access to .env file.

For the virtual env, I've never done this in Linux, so I'm kind of clueless and unsure if it would be worth doing? See everything I'm importing:

import json
import base64
import pandas as pd
import os
import pickle
import time
import re
import smtplib
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.action_chains import ActionChains
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException, TimeoutException
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from dotenv import load_dotenv

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