How do I use putenv() to update existing environment variable?

Question

Edit: as far as I can tell, my question is because of a defect in PHP. I've copied this question to the PHP bug tracker here: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=74143 and plan to try and implement a fix.

---

The putenv function sets the value of an environment variable. According to the manual, putenv returns true on success, false on failure.

However, I'm finding that the putenv function sometimes returns true without updating the environment variable for the current session.

To reproduce this issue, set an environment variable in a webserver using PHP FPM, by using the fastcgi_param directive. This is incredibly useful, as it allows setting environment variables in isolation to other hosts on the same server.

Example nginx.conf:

location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass    unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param   TESTVAR_ENV     old-value;
        include         fastcgi_params;
}

Example test.php:

var_dump(getenv("TESTVAR_ENV"));
var_dump(putenv("TESTVAR_ENV=new-value"));
var_dump(getenv("TESTVAR_ENV"));

Output of test.php:

string(12) "old-value"
bool(true)
string(12) "old-value"

As you can see:

1. the existing value is read by getenv successfully,
2. the putenv function returns true, indicating success,
3. the new value is not actually set, which is incredibly confusing.

Am I misunderstanding what the purpose of the putenv function is? Is there some missing documentation on the setenv manual page? How do I use putenv() to update existing environment variable?

Answer 1

This is interesting. After investigating i found that there's an undocumented parameter for getenv().

Calling putenv("TESTVAR_ENV=new-value") followed by getenv("TESTVAR_ENV", true) returns new-value as expected. However getenv("TESTVAR_ENV", true) returns false when called without explicitly setting the value first.

Reading from the source it seems that if local_only is set to false (the default), the value is fetched using sapi_getenv, whereas with local_only set to true the native getenv is used.

Furthermore, if sapi_getenv doesn't return a value, then getenv is called as a fallback. Meaning if you don't set TESTVAR_ENV in nginx/Apache configuration at all, putenv/getenv works as expected.

So to recap:

• getenv(name) searches from SAPI's (php-fpm) internal environment table, and fallbacks to OS's environment if variable is not set.
• getenv(name, true) searches only from OS's environment, which doesn't necessarily (depending on the SAPI) contain variables registered in the web server's configuration.
• putenv() always only updates OS's environment.

I used the following to test this:

header("Content-Type: text/plain");

dump_env();
echo 'getenv("TESTVAR_ENV") => ' .
    var_export(getenv("TESTVAR_ENV"), true) . "\n";
echo 'getenv("TESTVAR_ENV", true) => ' .
    var_export(getenv("TESTVAR_ENV", true), true) . "\n";
echo "-----------\n";
echo 'putenv("TESTVAR_ENV=new-value") => ' . 
    var_export(putenv("TESTVAR_ENV=new-value"), true) . "\n";
dump_env();
echo 'getenv("TESTVAR_ENV") => ' .
    var_export(getenv("TESTVAR_ENV"), true) . "\n";
echo 'getenv("TESTVAR_ENV", true) => ' .
    var_export(getenv("TESTVAR_ENV", true), true) . "\n";

function dump_env() {
    echo "--- env ---\n" . `env` . "-----------\n";
}