Report this

What is the reason for this report?

How to remove/delete an exported environment variable?

Posted on July 22, 2021

Hi all,

I was working with a remote API and I exported my API key so that I could have it available as an environment variable for my current shell session, as follows:

  1. export API_KEY=MY_API_KEY_HERE

However my workflow requires that at some point this env variable should be deleted, but I don’t want to log out and log in back again each time.

What is a good way to delete an environment variable?

Thanks!



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!

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.
0

Hello,

What I usually do is to use the unset command. All that you need to do is to run the following:

  1. unset API_KEY

If you are writing a script, for example, to check if this is working you could have the following check:

if [ ${API_KEY} ] ; then 
    echo $API_KEY 
else
    echo "No API Key Found"
fi

Or you could also use the printenv command which would print all of your currently available environment variables.

Hope that this helps!

Regards, Bobby

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.