Posts tagged systemd
Environment variables set by systemd
- 02 July 2019
Applications sometimes need environment variables to be set for triggering certain behavior like giving debug output or routing traffic via a HTTP-proxy for example. A common way is to modify the start-stop script, but with systemd on most Linux systems, like Debian and Red Hat based distributions, this can also be directly set within the unit file and you don’t have to export the variables anymore.
Let’s start with a Python script to read and print the environment variables set by the environment to see how this works. The Python script below that we run via systemd checks if environment variable VAR1 has been set and will generate different output based on that.