Environment Variables

You can define your own custom environment variables to use in your workflow steps. These are useful for configuration values that you want to reuse or change easily.

Example Workflow

This example defines variables at the workflow level and uses them in a Maven build step.

name: environment-variables

on: workflow_dispatch

env:
  MVN_TARGET_FOLDER: "target"
  MVN_WAR_FILE_NAME: "hello-world*.war"
  COPY_TARGET_FOLDER: "/tmp"

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Printing predefined variables
        run: |
          echo "$GITHUB_WORKFLOW"
          echo "$GITHUB_ACTION"
          echo "$GITHUB_REPOSITORY"
      - name: Setup Maven
        uses: stCarolas/setup-maven@v4.5
        with:
          maven-version: 3.6.0
      - name: Maven Build
        run: |
          mvn clean package
          pwd && ls -l
          ls -l ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}
          du -sh ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}
          du -sh ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}/${{ env.MVN_WAR_FILE_NAME }}
      - name: Copying war file to tmp folder
        run: |
          cp ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}/${{ env.MVN_WAR_FILE_NAME }} ${{ env.COPY_TARGET_FOLDER }}
          ls -l ${{ env.COPY_TARGET_FOLDER }}

Usage

You can access these variables using the env context syntax: ${{ env.VARIABLE_NAME }}.

They can be defined at: 1. Workflow level: Available to all jobs. 2. Job level: Available to all steps in a job. 3. Step level: Available only to that specific step.

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