1.2 Variables

Permalink: https://govcms.gov.au/wiki_vars

This page documents the environment variables and other variables used in the platform - specifically ones that GovCMS has created. You should check Lagoon Variables too.

If you see one of these variables in the wild, please ensure the documentation lives here, and update the variable comment in code to point to https://govcms.gov.au/wiki_vars#VARIABLE_NAME.

References to .env file also include .env.default file. (The .env file takes precedence). Lagoon also looks at .lagoon.env and .lagoon.env.$BRANCH files, but we are rarely (if ever) utilising them.

In the table below, a reference to just .env assumes it's used equally in all environments. References to "locally" are explicitly not Lagoon, however it probably includes GitLab jobs as these use Docker Compose. Bear in mind that GitLab variables can also be set through the GitLab UI, if you find a value is not working as expected.

Variable	Locations	Description
COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME	.env locally	Site name and prefix for all containers.
DEV_MODE	.env locally	Docker Compose uses this variable to turn on xdebug and other things (what?).
GOVCMS_IMAGE_VERSION	.env locally	Controls which version of GovCMS images are used, eg govcmslagoon/cli:latest vs govcmslagoon/cli:7.3.2. If unset this defaults to latest. This currently is only controlled in Lagoon through GraphQL as it controls a Docker buildtime variable.
LAGOON	Inside Lagoon containers	Lagoon sets this to match the name of the image. It's a reliable to determine if it's an image originating from Lagoon upstream. It is not used for checking "local vs remote".
LAGOON_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE	.env locally, Lagoon also sets	Lagoon sets this to "development" or "production". Locally it's forced to "local". Used by scripts to make decisions.
LOCALDEV_URL	.env locally	Local development URL
VOLUME_FLAGS	.env locally, OSX only	File access in hosted volumes can be very slow on Mac due to issues with the filesystem. Using cached or delegated here can really speed things up on OSX.
MARIADB_DATA_IMAGE	.env	An existing MariaDB-based Docker image. This will usually be your nightly database backup (created by the platform), but can be a generic pre-installed GovCMS. If this is not set, various processes like GitLab will install GovCMS Drupal profile by default and not backup a nightly sanitized production database image to the gitlab registry.
STAGE_FILE_PROXY_URL	.env	Used by Drupal for the stage_file_proxy module. Point to alternate URL to ensure images and assets are available in the current environment.
X_FRAME_OPTIONS	.env	Controls a setting in Nginx container. Setting to SameOrigin disallows embedding content (e.g via iFrame) from any external domain. Seckit click-jacking configuration needs to be configured in parallel to this setting.