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.
machine0 env new production
machine0 env set production DATABASE_URL=postgres://... REDIS_URL=redis://...
machine0 new my-vm --env production
env ls
machine0 env ls
machine0 env ls --json
env get
Show env set details and variables.
env new
Creates an empty env set. Add variables with env set.
env set
Add or update variables in an env set.
machine0 env set <name> <KEY=VALUE...>
machine0 env set production DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/mydb
machine0 env set production API_KEY=sk_live_123 LOG_LEVEL=info
A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _, starting with a letter or underscore). Values cannot contain newlines, carriage returns, double quotes, or null bytes.
env unset
Remove variables from an env set.
machine0 env unset <name> <KEY...>
machine0 env unset production LOG_LEVEL DEBUG
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.
Limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|
| Variables per set | 100 |
| Sets per user | 50 |
| Value size | 4 KB |
| Total set size | 64 KB |
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.
Env sets are not supported with NixOS images yet. NixOS uses declarative Nix configuration instead of cloud-init.