How to get PHP to be able to read system environment variables

I am using PHP as PHP-FPM on Centos. I am trying to follow the http://12factor.net/ guidelines of having the settings be stored in environment variables.

I have created a file in /etc/profile.d that sets the environment variables I want, and the environment variables appear when tested in the CLI via Bash i.e. running the bash script:

echo $SOME_SERVER_SETTING

shows the correct output.

I have set the clear_env setting to false and variables_order to EGPCS, however, the variable I have set does not show up in PHP either getenv('SOME_SERVER_SETTING') or doing var_dump($_ENV)

What other setting needs to be set to allow PHP-FPM to receive all of the server environment variables, and in particular those set through a shell script in /etc/profiles.d on Centos?

Answer

Security reasons 🙂

See /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf (debian location, may be different on CentOs)

; Clear environment in FPM workers
; Prevents arbitrary environment variables from reaching FPM worker processes
; by clearing the environment in workers before env vars specified in this
; pool configuration are added.
; Setting to "no" will make all environment variables available to PHP code
; via getenv(), $_ENV and $_SERVER.
; Default Value: yes
;clear_env = no 

; Pass environment variables like LD_LIBRARY_PATH. All $VARIABLEs are taken from
; the current environment.
; Default Value: clean env
;env[HOSTNAME] = $HOSTNAME
;env[PATH] = /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
;env[TMP] = /tmp
;env[TMPDIR] = /tmp
;env[TEMP] = /tmp