Question

How to get environment variables in a PHP serverless function?

Posted on May 26, 2022
Serverless PHP PHP Frameworks
Asked by Bobby Iliev

Hi all,

You can define environment variables in a couple of ways as described in the serverless Functions documentation here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/functions/reference/project-configuration/#environment

Once you’ve defined your environment variables, you can follow the steps here on how to get the value of an environment variable in your PHP serverless Functions.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• May 26, 2022

Accepted Answer

If you were to try and use the environment variable directly, eg. echo $YOUR_VAR you will get a warning stating that the variable is not defined.

You will have to use the builtin getenv() PHP function to get the value of the environment variable first, and then use that value in your code:

$your_var = getenv('TEST_VAR');
echo $your_var;

The same would go for JavaScript functions with the process core Node module that gives you access to the environment variables thanks to the env property (eg: process.env['your_env']).

Hope that this helps!