If you set a custom environment variable through dotfiles or the terminal, the variable is not available in your Drupal application. Therefore, you must create a new .conf file under /home/ide/configs/apache2. The following is an example:

1. Create the variables.conf file and populate it with one or more SetEnv lines to declare your custom environment variables:

SetEnv FOO "bar"

2. Restart Apache:

ide:~$ acli ide:service-restart apache

3. Print the new environment variable in your application:

print $_ENV["FOO"];

Drupal should return bar.