How to set environment variables on Windows with Powershell

The concern is documenting setting the env variables from powershell instead of via GUI. There is a transient (session-specific), but more importantly, also a non-intuitive and often needed persistent way of doing this.

Pavol Kutaj

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Sep 4, 2023

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1. transient

• note that the above method are scoped to the current powershell process

1.1. it is a provider

• you can use environmental variables like a drive

▶ cd env:
▶ dir

Name                           Value
----                           -----
__COMPAT_LAYER                 Installer
ALLUSERSPROFILE                C:\ProgramData
APPDATA                        C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Roaming
asl.log                        Destination=file
ChocolateyInstall              C:\ProgramData\chocolatey

• use set-content $env $value
• in my case

Set-Content .\CONSUL_HTTP_TOKEN 1111111-1111-111111-1111-111111111111

1.2. just do it directly

• use the built-in $env

$env:CONSUL_HTTP_TOKEN = 1111111-1111-111111-1111-111111111111

1.3. setting env vars

• for the machine-level

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("TestVariableName", "My Value", "Machine")

2. persistent

• you need to use a deeper .NET mechanisms to make this persistent

2.1. user-scope

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('KEY', 'VALUE', [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

• example

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('ELECTRON_NO_ATTACH_CONSOLE', 'true', [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

2.2. machine-scope

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('KEY', 'VALUE', [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

3. sources

• PowerShell One-Liner: Creating and Modifying an Environment Variable
• Use PowerShell to Persist Environment Variables — Trevor Sullivan