Variables

What it is

Environment variables (including secrets) made available to your project's functions and frontends at runtime.

How it relates

• Belongs to a project.
• Consumed by functions and frontends at runtime.
• Sourced from an env file (volcano/volcano.env or ./volcano.env) or the declarative config. When declared in the manifest, variables are fully synced on config deploy: entries absent from the manifest are deleted.

CLI operations

Without cloud, these commands act on local development (volcano start), not on your cloud project. When local development is not running they fail rather than fall back to the cloud.

deploy reads variables from the file only; NAME=value arguments are an error. It creates and updates variables and never deletes them.

On macOS and Linux, -f also takes a process substitution, so a secrets manager's output can be deployed without writing it to disk:

volcano cloud variables deploy -f <(op inject -i volcano.env.tpl)

Through the npm-installed CLI, this works from bash, and on macOS it needs Node.js 22.15 or later. zsh's process substitution doesn't reach the npm-installed CLI.

Shared variables

A shared variable reaches every function whose variable_scope is all, the default. Without --shared, deploy keeps today's default: new variables are shared and existing ones keep their setting.

• --shared=false saves every variable in the file as not shared. A function then receives one only when its variable_scope is scoped and it lists or reads the name.
• --shared saves every variable in the file as shared.

variables get shows whether a variable is shared. This setting applies to functions; frontends use frontend_shared_variables. In the manifest, set shared on a variable entry instead; see Shared variable names.

Examples

# Deploy variables from volcano/volcano.env (or a custom file)
volcano cloud variables deploy
volcano cloud variables deploy -f ./secrets.env

# Save them as not shared, for scoped functions that select them
volcano cloud variables deploy -f ./secrets.env --shared=false

# Inspect and remove
volcano cloud variables list
volcano cloud variables get STRIPE_SECRET_KEY
volcano cloud variables delete STRIPE_SECRET_KEY

# The same against local development
volcano variables deploy

Deploying variables triggers a rollout to the affected functions and frontends.

volcano deploy deploys the env file first, before the code that reads it. It refuses when a manifest also declares variables, because applying that section would delete the variables only the env file sets.