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environment-variables.md

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Environment Variables

This Drupal site is designed to read critical environment variables from the .env file in the root of the repository, leveraging the phpdotenv library.

The file EnvironmentHandler.php loads this file for every request or CLI action that includes the Drupal autoloader.

Any existing environment variables will be overwritten if the same variable exists in this file.

Benefits

Using a .env file instead on relying on the server environment has many benefits:

  • When the Composer autoloader is forced to use the .env, all of tools that use it will have the exact same environment. This includes Drupal itself, and everything in the .bin folder: drush, phpunit, behat, yaml-tasks, etc.
  • No need to write variables to server configuration.
  • No need to pass variables through docker, docker-compose, Dockerfiles, etc.
  • No need to worry about the execution environment:
    • Every system (local, CI, BRD, etc) has it's way of loading the "execution environment" for running processes.
    • In other words, commands like drush cache-rebuild or ./bin/yaml-tasks are run by the apache user in BRD, the aegir user in CMS-CI, and the www-data user in Lando.
    • By using a single .env file for all environments, we no longer have to maintain scripts to set system-specific environment variables.

See Why .env? on the dotenv README for more information.

Setting the Environment

All environments except Lando will load the .env file, if it exists.

The .env file is ignored in the git repo. It must be created by the ops platform that is running the code.

Local Development

The default values contained in .env.lando are designed to work in a standard Lando environment. You shouldn't have to change these, but you are free to.

If you are using a different Drupal development environment, you can create your own .env file by copying the .env.lando file and changing the values as needed.

CMS-CI

The default values for Tugboat environments are templated from .tugboat/.env.j2.

CMS in BRD

The BRD environments for CMS include DEV, STAGING, and PROD. The environment variables for these are set in the DevOps Repo.

The VA devops repo is private. Sensitive environment variables for BRD may be stored in Credstash if it is deemed necessary, but it is not required.

See the files:

CredStash

Environment variables like API tokens should be treated as secrets.

For secrets, the BRD system uses CredStash. See the DevOps Repo: CredStash Readme section for information on how to add values to CredStash.