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Environment Variables

The following environment variables can be used to configure StepUp.

  • STEPUP_ROOT: The root directory containing the top-level plan.py file. If not set, StepUp will look for this file in the current directory.
  • STEPUP_STRICT: Set to "1" to enable strict checks. This will make StepUp fail on some internal inconsistency checks, rather than applying corrections to overcome the inconsistencies. (Every such inconsistency is due to a bug, which should be fixed eventually.)
  • STEPUP_EXTERNAL_SOURCES: a colon-separated list of directories outside STEPUP_ROOT where automatically detected dependencies should be retained and converted to relative paths. This is useful when you have source files that are not part of the StepUp project. For example, if you are developing a Python library and used it in a StepUp project, changes to the development version of the library will cause stepup to re-run the affected steps.

We recommend using tools like direnv to manage these variables. Once direnv is installed and configured, you can create a .envrc file in the root directory of your project, e.g. with the following contents:

export STEPUP_ROOT=${PWD}

As you change to the project directory (or any of its subdirectories) in your shell, the environment variables will be set automatically.