more on bash env vars

Say you had a application that depended on certain environmental variables to be available before it ran.

To export all the variables to the environement in one shot, you can group them in a script file and then source that file. For example:

touch set_env_vars.sh

(no chmod needed for this example since we won’t be executing the script)

in env_vars.sh:

#!/bin/bash

export POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
export POSTGRES_PORT=5432
export POSTGRES_USER=postgres
export POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
export POSTGRES_DB=my_cool_db

back at the terminal

source env_vars.sh

# alternative syntax:
# . env_vars.sh

env | grep -i postgres

you should see a list of those variables, now availabe to subprocesses of the current shell.