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What is Environment Variable?

A dynamic value stored outside the application code that configures behavior without hardcoding sensitive or environment-specific data.

Environment variables store configuration that changes between environments (development, staging, production). Common examples include DATABASE_URL, API_KEY, and DEBUG_MODE.

They keep secrets out of source code, following the twelve-factor app methodology. Tools like .env files, Docker environment settings, and cloud provider secret managers handle environment variable management.

Related Terms

Monitoring
The practice of collecting, analyzing, and alerting on system metrics and logs to ensure application health and performance.
Terraform
An open-source tool for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure using declarative configuration files.
Continuous Deployment
A practice where every code change that passes automated tests is automatically deployed to production.
Chaos Engineering
The discipline of deliberately introducing failures into a system to test its resilience and identify weaknesses before they cause outages.
Pipeline as Code
Defining CI/CD pipeline configurations as version-controlled code files rather than through UI-based pipeline builders.
Rolling Update
A deployment strategy that gradually replaces old application instances with new ones, maintaining availability throughout.
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