How to make environment variables available to Apache, started as a service?

Question

I know that adding some environment variables to /etc/environment will make them available system-wide, adding them to /etc/profile , ~/.bashrc or equivalent, will make available to a specific user... all this however applies to interactive sessions. When Apache is started as a systemd service, it is a non-interactive session so it does not see those environment variables. Can I have Apache parse an .env file which contains lines like

env1=foo
env2=bar
...

and then could access them in my PHP code with $_SERVER['foo'] , etc. Of course, I would like to achive the same for other systemd services too, so is there any specific file that provides env variables for services?

Answer 1

You can use the SetEnv directive in the site's Apache configuration file to set environment variables for that site, like this:

SetEnv DATABASE_NAME foo

This needs to go inside the <VirtualHost> directive.

Once you have restarted the server this data should be accessible either via the $_ENV superglobal or getenv(). The downside of this approach is that if your application includes anything that isn't executed by Apache, such as a queue worker or console command, it won't have access to the same variables unless you duplicate them in an appropriate place (eg your .bashrc).

Or you can use a library like DotEnv.