Question

How to get environment variables in a PHP serverless function?

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.


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
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!

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel