Environment Variables

You can pass environment variables into your workspace and use them in your code as usual. Please refer to the documentation of your programming language of choice for details on that.

Default Environment Variables

The following environment variables are set automatically by Gitpod and are guaranteed to exist:

• GITPOD_WORKSPACE_ID: The Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) associated with the workspace.
• GITPOD_WORKSPACE_URL: The unique URL of the workspace.

Reserved Prefix

Environment variables beginning with the prefix GITPOD_ are reserved for internal use by Gitpod and are overridden on every workspace startup. This means that a user-defined variable set with the name GITPOD_FOOBAR will be ignored and not accessible in the workspace.

User-Specific Environment Variables

Gitpod supports encrypted, user-specific environment variables. They are stored as part of your user settings and can be used to set access tokens, or pass any other kind of user-specific information to your workspaces.

Project-Specific Environment Variables

Environment variables which are defined in project settings will be visible in prebuilds, and optionally also in workspaces. This is useful for prebuilds to access restricted services.

WARNING Care should be taken with secrets. Allowing secrets to be accessed from workspaces will expose those secrets to anyone who can open the workspace.

Using the command line: gp env

The gp CLI prints and modifies the persistent environment variables associated with your user for the current repository.

To set the persistent environment variable foo to the value bar use:

gp env foo=bar

Beware that this does not modify your current terminal session, but rather persists this variable for the next workspace on this repository. gp can only interact with the persistent environment variables for this repository, not the environment variables of your terminal. If you want to set that environment variable in your terminal, you can do so using -e:

eval $(gp env -e foo=bar)

To update the current terminal session with the latest set of persistent environment variables, use:

eval $(gp env -e)

To delete a persistent environment variable use:

gp env -u foo

Note that you can delete/unset variables if their repository pattern matches the repository of this workspace exactly. I.e. you cannot delete environment variables with a repository pattern of /foo, foo/ or /.

Usage:
  gp env [flags]

Flags:
  -e, --export   produce a script that can be eval'ed in Bash
  -h, --help     help for env
  -u, --unset    deletes/unsets persisted environment variables

Using the account settings

You can also configure and view the persistent environment variables in your account settings.

You can add as many environment variables as you wish.

The repository pattern of each variable determines in what workspace it will be available. Repository patterns follow the owner/repository pattern. You can use a wildcard on either of the two, e.g. gitpod-io/* would make that variable available in all repositories owned by gitpod-io. Conversely */vscode would make that variable available on all repositories called vscode; this is especially useful for forks. Subsequently */* makes that variable available in every workspace.

Beware: while the variable values are stored encrypted, they are available as plain text inside a workspace. Be careful when sharing your live workspace or when using */* as repository pattern.

Terminal Specific Environment Variables

You can set environment variables within the terminal of VS Code by setting the env property within the task definition in your .gitpod.yml.

For example:

tasks:
  - name: Example of passing an environment variable to a command
    env:
      PRINT_ME: "Hello World!"
    command: echo $PRINT_ME

See .gitpod.yml for more details.

Provide env vars via URL

❗️ This feature is great for configuring environment variables but is not appropriate for configuring sensitive information, such as passwords or long-lived API tokens. Gitpod and the Open Web Application Security Project recommends that you do not pass sensitive information through query strings. Refer to CWE-598 to learn more about this recommendation.

In addition to user-specific env variables, Gitpod also allows passing in variables through the gitpod.io/# URL. The syntax for that is:

https://gitpod.io/#var=value,var2=value2/https://github.com/my-org/repo-to-work-on

The values are URL encoded to allow any non-ascii characters in values. In case of a conflict, e.g. in the example above if the user already had a variable var2 set, the user’s value would be used.