Environment Variable Loading

When a project agent starts, it loads project environment variables and resolves ${VAR} placeholders inside downcity.json.

Common use cases

• referencing secrets from config
• avoiding plain-text secrets inside downcity.json

Recommended practice

• keep secrets in project .env files or a controlled runtime environment
• keep only ${VAR_NAME} references in config

Benefits:

• config is easier to share
• secrets are less likely to be committed by accident
• changing environments is easier

What to do after changes

Usually you should restart the agent:

city agent restart

The agent reads and resolves this configuration at startup, so changing environment variables alone does not automatically refresh the current runtime process.