setting persistent environment variables

2019-11-10

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~1 min read

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111 words

To make an environment variable available in Bash or Zsh, save the environment to .bashrc or zshrc respectively.

To set the variable, open the respective .rc file:

vim ~/.bashrc

Then edit the .bashrc:

# The rest of the .bashrc file…
export VARIABLE_NAME=variable-value

Save, quit, and reload your terminal.

You should now be able to access the environmental variable by name. For example:

$ echo ${VARIABLE_NAME}
variable-value

Related: If you’re using environment variables in scripts (e.g., an NPM install from a private registry) and you get an error:

Failed to replace env in config: ${AUTH_TOKEN}

It’s worth verifying that the variable AUTH_TOKEN is exported.



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