Environmental Variables

Several times, you might need to set environmental variables for your notebook applications such as API keys, secrets or other parameters that needs to be retrieveable via the PHP getenv function. This can be easily done via the Environmental variables tab in the configurations options.

Default Environmental variables

Some frameworks such as laravel and lumen skelenton has default environmental variables. These variables are automatically set for the notebook having default values same as those in the framework skelenton. Standard notebooks also come with two default variables which are the DB_DATABASE which stores the path to the sqlite database file and DB_CONNECTION which specifies the type of database connection being used. Any of these environmental variables can be changed to your desired value or removed completely.

Setting an environmental variable

New environmental variables can be added by using the form in the tab which requests for the name and value of the environmental variable. When a notebook is accessed by another user other then it owner, the enviromental variables are hidden . This also applies to when the notebook is forked. A checkbox is also provided which sets if the variable being added is required or not. When a notebook with environmental variables set as required is forked by other users, it prompts them that an environmental variable needs to be set to use the notebook. A practical use case is when demonstrating how to use an API client which requires using API credentials from an API service. You can easily add such credentials as environmental variables hence not risking others having access to it when they fork your notebook while they also get prompted that the credentials are required to run the notebook.

Updating an environmental variable

All environmental variables that are set for a notebook are listed in the environmental variables tab. By hovering over any of them, the edit icon is show. Clicking on the edit icon displays a form to update the name and value of the environmental variable.

Removing an environmental variable

Hovering over each environmental variable shows a delete icon. clicking on the icon immediately the environmental variable.