Environment Variable

Do you need to keep secure your environment variable? Use Secret instead of Environment Variable.

Qovery makes Environment Variables available to your services at runtime, as well as during builds and deploys.

Environment Variables are not directly connected to Environment concept.

• Environment Variables: represent variables you can store and retrieve in your applications.
• Environments: represent environments with services (apps, databases, and other services).

Here is a short video to show how to use environment variables.

Create an Environment Variable

1. Navigate to Console

2. Select your project, environment and application

3. Select Environment Variables tab in the left panel and click Create button:

   

4. Select the name and value of your new environment variable

   

   Scopes

   Qovery provides three scopes of environment variables:

   • Project
   • Environment
   • Application

   
   

   Additionally, there is one more BUILT_IN scope that is used for variables injected automatically by Qovery.

   Project environment variables are visible in the whole project.

   Environment environment variables are visible for all apps inside one environment.

   Application environment variables are visible only in one application.

   BUILT_IN variables are automatically injected to selected applications by Qovery.

   Read more in Levels section

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Delete an Environment Variable

1. Navigate to Console

2. Select your project, environment and application

3. Select the Environment Variables tab in the left panel

   

4. Select variable you want to delete and click the Delete button:

   

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Update an Environment Variable

1. Navigate to Console

2. Select your project, environment and application

3. Select the Environment Variables tab in the left panel

   

4. Select variable you want to update and click the Edit button:

   

5. Update the variable in the popup window:

   

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Override Environment Variable

If you want to override a value of an environment variable, follow those steps:

1. Navigate to Console

2. Select your project, environment and application

3. Select the Environment Variables tab in the left panel

   

4. Select variable you want to override and click the Override button:

   

5. Override the variable in the popup window:

   

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

You can only override environment variables of a higher scope, e.g. Environment scope variable can override Project variable, but can't override Application variable.

Alias Environment Variable

You can create an alias for the existing environment variable.

Let's suppose that your application requires a DATABASE_URL variable. Qovery provides your application with the QOVERY_DATABASE_MY_POSTGRESQL_3498225_URL variable with a database password. Instead of copy-pasting its value, you can create an alias to QOVERY_DATABASE_MY_POSTGRESQL_3498225_URL.

1. Navigate to Console

2. Select your project, environment and application

3. Select the Environment Variables tab in the left panel

   

4. Select variable you want to alias and click the Alias button:

   

5. Alias the variable in the popup window:

   

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Levels

There are four levels of Environment Variables. Each type differs in scope - you can create variables bound to application, environment, or project.

Scope	Level	Description
BUILT_IN	1	Automatically generated variables based on your configuration (e.g., requested databases) propagated to all projects, environments, and applications
PROJECT	2	Variables at the project level are shared across all environments and all applications of the project
ENVIRONMENT	3	Variables at the environment level are shared across all applications of the project in one, given environment
APPLICATION	4	Variables available for one application in one environment

Built-in variables

By default, every environment contains built-in variables:

Name	Example	Description
QOVERY_BRANCH_NAME	master	Git branch name
QOVERY_IS_PRODUCTION	true	Flag that indicates production environment

Additional built-in variables

For any added service (database, broker, storage), your application receives additional built-in variables. These can be used, for example, to connect to the database.

Naming Convention:

We use the following naming convention for additional built-in variables:

QOVERY_<SERVICE_TYPE>_<NAME>_<SPEC>

Additional Rules

• Environment variable keys should use only alphanumeric characters and the underscore character (_) to ensure they are accessible from all programming languages. Environment variable keys should not include the hyphen character.
• Environment variable keys should not begin with a double underscore (__).
• An environment variable’s key should not begin with QOVERY_ unless it is set by the Qovery platform itself.