Configuration: Environment Variables

In this lesson, we’ll detach the configuration from the instance, following the third principle of the twelve-factor app to store configuration in the environment. To do this, we will use environment variables similar to how we store the AWS credentials for the Educative terminal.

To do so, we’ll prepare a WordPress image to read environment variables through its configuration file. In the next lesson, we’ll prepare the EC2 user data script to set these environment variables externally.

Configuration variables to consider

First, we need to know which environment variables we want to set.

The most important configuration variables for WordPress that we need to manage are the following: