23 Feb 2022 - David Baker
If you’re reading this you might’ve already tried setting your Environment Variables in /etc/profile or /etc/environment or possibly ~/.bashrc and it’s still not being picked up in c# by Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("API_KEY") (for example).
If you are running a .Net Core Web Api on Linux under a systemctl daemon service, you have to store the Environment Variable on the service settings you set up:
cd /etc/systemd/system
sudo nano my-app-name.service
Notice the last few lines in the config:
[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/my-app-site
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dotnet /var/www/my-app-site/my-app.dll
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
SyslogIdentifier=my-app
User=www-data
Environment=ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Production
Environment=DOTNET_PRINT_TELEMETRY_MESSAGE=false
Environment=API_KEY=my-key-val
Followed by:
systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart my-app-name.service
Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("API_KEY") should now be returning my-key-val