When comparing two environments and deploying configuration elements between them, some fields may have inherently different values. For example, a webhook URL in a staging environment may be different than the same webhook's URL in the production environment.

Salto allows users to set environment variables for these fields, in order to specify what should be the unique value for each environment. This helps maintaining the right value for existing elements in each environment, as well as automatically replacing relevant values for elements deployed to a new environment.

Environment variables consist of:

When deploying new elements, Salto will replace a value when deploying if:

When comparing elements between environments, Salto will hide differences that match a variable's source and destination environment values, to help users focus on meaningful differences. In this case, the element will show the value in the destination environment, with a useful popover to show all values:

Salto will also alert when detecting a difference with a value defined only on one side (with no value set for the other side).

There are 2 ways to set a new environment variable:

Only organization administrators can create, edit or delete environment variables. The environments will apply to all user deployments.

During a deployment's comparison phase, you can set a new environment variable by selecting a "create environment variable" option on a specific difference. Do this on values which are expected to be different, and should not be "aligned".
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You can set the variable to apply on the specific instance you're looking at (e.g. a single Jira automation, Zendesk Webhook, Okta application), or on all instances from this type. You can also set a variable which will replace these values across other fields as well, in all elements of this type.

After you select this option, review the suggested environment specific values. Salto auto-populates these values from other environments. You can always choose to customize the rule values, scope, or any other setting from this screen.

After creating an environment variable, configuration differences which have a matching environment variable will not be displayed as a difference. The source and destination values should match the ones specified in the environment variables.

If all differences in an element have matching environment variables, or have been excluded, the entire element row will not be shown in the comparison. Users can always toggle "Show Omitted Elements" to see these.

Users can create a new environment variable directly from the Environment Variables view, accessible from user settings -> Org Settings -> Environment Variables:

When you create a new environment variable from this screen, you'll have to manually fill in the scope and environment specific values. For the scope, it is recommended that you copy an element's Salto ID to get a valid scope, and then adapt it to your needs.

When setting environment specific values, make sure their type matches the expected value in the elements themselves. Auto-populated values will be formatted correctly.

If you're not sure about a field's type, go to a configuration element which contains it and view its NACL to determine the expected type.

When Salto replaces a value to another value during a deployment, the replaced value will be marked in the deployment preview stage. You can see which environment variable caused the replacement.

If the replacement isn't correct, fix your environment variables from the Environment Variables screen, then regenerate the preview.

Some common usages for environment variables include:

Coming soon: Salto will soon support replacing values which appear as substrings of configuration fields. Once enabled, we'll support use cases like these: