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Why can’t I update Environment Variables when importing a release?

 Why can’t I update Environment Variables when importing a release?


When importing a release with Environment Variables in, the current environment variables are not being updated with the imported values.

CAUSE
This is by design.  If it's the same in all environments that it's being distributed to, then it's probably not a good candidate for an environment variable.

'Environment Variables' are designed to be specific to an 'Environment' - i.e., a database, therefore environment variables are environment-bound.

We set the value to the incoming value if there's no environment variable with that name in the target environment; but we retained the notion that the import is of "the existence of an environment variable, not of its value".

They were introduced so that you could move the bits that vary between dev / test / live environments (eg. file paths; server names; run-modes etc) into environment variables; if you could override your live environment variable values with dev/test values, it would break the live environments too easily.

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