Manage environment variables

Environment variables are a method for injecting information into WordPress and Node.js VIP Platform environments.

Environment variables are commonly used to:

• Provide sensitive values (such as API secrets) to an application without committing the values to a site’s GitHub repository or storing the values in a site’s database.
• Provide flags that can be used to vary behavior between environments. For example, an environment variable can be set to provide one value to a production environment and a different value to a develop environment.

Limitations

• Each VIP Platform environment has its own discrete set of environment variables. For an environment variable to be available on all environments, it must be set on each environment separately.
• An environment variable’s key is limited to 255 bytes.
• An environment variable’s value is limited to 4096 bytes.
• The overall limit of all keys and values of an environment’s environment variables is 16384 bytes.

Reserved names

Some environment variable names are reserved:

• The prefixes WPCOM_, VIP_, and IS_VIP_ are reserved and cannot be used for environment variable naming.
• To avoid conflicts, names reserved for WordPress constants (e.g. DB_NAME) cannot be used as environment variables.

Manage environment variables with VIP-CLI

Manage environment variables (i.e. set, get, delete, or list) on a VIP Platform environment with the subcommands of the VIP-CLI command: vip config envvar.

On a VIP Local Development Environment, manage environment variables with the subcommands of vip dev-env envvar.

Add or update a value

Use the VIP-CLI command vip config envvar set [options] to add or update an environment variable and assign it a value.

In this example command and output, a new environment variable EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR is added to a WordPress environment. A value is assigned to the new environment variable and the user chooses to apply the environment variable immediately so that it is available to application code:

$ vip @example-app.develop config envvar set EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR 
For multiline input, use the --from-file option.

✔ Enter the value for EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR: · 1234567890
✔ Please confirm the input value above (y/N) · true
? Apply this environment variable update now? (y/N) › false
Successfully set environment variable "EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR"
Environment variable is active and available.

If the user chooses not to make the new or updated environment variable immediately available, it will become available by default when the next code deployment occurs on that environment.

Access environment variables in an application

Environment variables are always provided as strings, even if their value resembles another data type (e.g., "true", "123", "[1, 2, 3]"). String values can be converted or deserialized by an application into the desired data type, but they should be validated thoroughly.

On the VIP Platform, environment variables are accessed differently depending on the application type.

Node.js

Environment variables are provided as actual environment variables and are accessed using process.env. For example:

const apiKey = process.env.EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR || null;

WordPress

Environment variables are accessed using the Environment::get_var() helper method or vip_get_env_var helper function. For example:

<?php
// Using class method
$api_key = Automattic\VIP\Environment::get_var( 'EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR', $default_value );
// Using helper function
$api_key = vip_get_env_var( 'EXAMPLE_ENV_VAR', $default_value );