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Create named sets of environment variables and inject them into VMs at creation time. Variables are written to /etc/environment and /etc/profile.d/machine0-env.sh via cloud-init.

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env ls

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env get

Show env set details and variables.

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env new

Creates an empty env set. Add variables with env set.

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env set

Add or update variables in an env set.
Keys must be valid POSIX names (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _, starting with a letter or underscore). Values cannot contain newlines, carriage returns, double quotes, or null bytes.

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env unset

Remove variables from an env set.

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env rm

Delete an env set.
VMs that were created with the deleted env set are not affected — variables are baked in at creation time.

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Limits

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How injection works

Variables are injected once at VM creation via cloud-init into two files. Both are needed because Linux reads environment variables from different places depending on context:
  • /etc/environment — read by PAM and systemd (services, cron jobs, non-login sessions)
  • /etc/profile.d/machine0-env.sh — sourced by login shells (SSH sessions)
Updating an env set after creation does not affect already-running VMs. On NixOS images, variables land in user-writable files instead of /etc: ~/.machine0/env.sh (sourced by login shells and every zsh invocation) and ~/.ssh/environment (applied by sshd to every SSH session, regardless of shell). Older NixOS image versions ignore env sets until the image updates.