How do you set server specific ENV values in Nginx?

Question

I am starting a project that uses environment variables to set the database connection and a couple other things. (They didn't want to use configuration files since people are careless and overwrite them).

Anyway, I am using nginx and while it supports env - it doesn't seem to support it well enough. You can't set the env values on a per-server block basis. In other words, this won't work:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name domain;
    env FOO = "bar";
}

You must do this:

env FOO = "bar";

http {
    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name domain;
    }
}

Which means that I can't have vhost-specific values. So I must create a whole vhost config for each site and only activate the one I want at the moment so that the value is set correctly.

Is there any way to work around this?

Answer 1

It turns out that if you are using fastcgi you can get around this by passing the values from fastcgi_param.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name domain;

    # Pass PHP scripts to php-fastcgi listening on port 9000
    location ~ path/to/it {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_param FOO "bar";
    }
}