Naming Environment Variables

I often go back-and-forth on what to name env vars. Should I put an underscore here? Should I combine these words into one?

While reading spring’s docs, I came across a concise set of rules for just that. Now, the rules are specific to spring configuration. But I like them as general rules too.

Anddd, I quote:

Most operating systems impose strict rules around the names that can be used for environment variables. For example, Linux shell variables can contain only letters (a to z or A to Z), numbers (0 to 9) or the underscore character (_). By convention, Unix shell variables will also have their names in UPPERCASE.

Spring Boot’s relaxed binding rules are, as much as possible, designed to be compatible with these naming restrictions.

To convert a property name in the canonical-form to an environment variable name you can follow these rules:

• Replace dots (.) with underscores (_).
• Remove any dashes (-).
• Convert to uppercase.

For example, the configuration property spring.main.log-startup-info would be an environment variable named SPRING_MAIN_LOGSTARTUPINFO.

Environment variables can also be used when binding to object lists. To bind to a List, the element number should be surrounded with underscores in the variable name.

For example, the configuration property my.acme[0].other would use an environment variable named MY_ACME_0_OTHER.