How to access a file a path level below from a subfolder

Something like this could work:

from pathlib import Path
import os

FILENAME = os.getenv('MY_CREDENTIALS')
filePath = Path(FILENAME)

if filePath.exists() and filePath.is_file():
    print("Success: File exists")
    print(filePath.read_text())
else:
    print("Error: File does not exist. Getting file from level below.")
    print((filePath.absolute().parent.parent / filePath.name).read_text())

Basically, you check whether your file exists in the current folder. This will be the case, if your script is in your root folder. If it is not, you assume that you are in a subfolder. So you try to get the file from one level below (your root). It's not totally production ready, but for the specific case you mentioned it should work. In production you should think about cases where you might have nested subfolder or your file is missing for good.