How to Get System Environment Variables into PHP While Running Cli & Apache2Handler

How to get system environment variables into PHP while running CLI & Apache2Handler?

I had exactly the same problem. To solve it, I just sourced /etc/environment inside /etc/apache2/envvars.

The content of /etc/environment:

export MY_PROJECT_PATH=/var/www/my-project
export MY_PROJECT_ENV=production
export MY_PROJECT_MAIL=support@my-project.com

The content of /etc/apache2/envvars:

# Load all the system environment variables.
. /etc/environment

Now, I'm able to use these variables in the Apache Virtual Host config files and in PHP.

Here's an example of an Apache virtual host:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName my-project.com
  ServerAlias www.my-project.com
  ServerAdmin ${MY_PROJECT_MAIL}
  UseCanonicalName On

  DocumentRoot ${MY_PROJECT_PATH}/www

  # Error log.
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/my-project.com_error.log
  LogLevel warn

  # Access log.
  <IfModule log_config_module>
    LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%m %>U%q\" %>s %b %D" clean_url_log_format
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/my-project.com_access.log clean_url_log_format
  </IfModule>

  # DocumentRoot directory
  <Directory ${MY_PROJECT_PATH}/www>
    # Disable .htaccess rules completely, for better performance.
    AllowOverride None
    Options FollowSymLinks Includes
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from All

    Include ${MY_PROJECT_PATH}/config/apache/inc.mime-types.conf
    Include ${MY_PROJECT_PATH}/config/apache/inc.cache-control.conf

    # Rewrite rules.
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine on
      RewriteBase /

      # Include all the common rewrite rules (for http and https).
      Include ${MY_PROJECT_PATH}/config/apache/inc.rewriterules-shared.conf
    </IfModule>
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

And this is an example of how to access them with PHP:

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
print getenv('MY_PROJECT_PATH') . "\n" .
      getenv('MY_PROJECT_ENV') . "\n" .
      getenv('MY_PROJECT_MAIL') . "\n";
?>

How to Dynamically Set Enviroment Variables in Apache2

This was never really resolved.

In the end we analysed the codebase and found that the custom enviroment variable was not needed and blanket replaced it with DOCUMENT_ROOT

One caveat was needing to ensure DOCUMENT_ROOT was set / passed in for cronjobs or cli operations.

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