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Powershell - set env vars in different scopes

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By Julius Gamanyi
1 min read

While trying to understand this line from the utilities that GitHub uses for their GitHub Runners, it occurred to me that environment variables are defined in different contexts that affects how long they last.

Thanks to shellgeek, there’s a way to set the env vars in PowerShell accordingly:

  • Env vars for the duration of the powershell session and process: $Env:GoHugo = "C:\Hugo\bin\"

  • Env var for the User account (System Settings -> Advanced -> Environment Variables -> User): [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('GoHugo','C:\Hugo\bin',[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

  • Env var for the machine in (System Settings -> Advanced -> Environment Variables -> System): [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('GoHugo','C:\Hugo\bin',[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

powershell env vars
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.