Environment Variables

This page documents all environment variables recognised by Photosphere.

AWS / S3 Variables

S3 credentials are never stored in a config file. When a database has no linked S3 credential secret in the vault, Photosphere reads AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_REGION, and AWS_ENDPOINT directly from process.env to construct S3 credentials.

Variable	Description	Example
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	S3 access key ID	AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	S3 secret access key	wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
AWS_REGION	S3 region (defaults to us-east-1 when unset)	us-east-1
AWS_ENDPOINT	S3 endpoint URL (for non-AWS S3-compatible services)	https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com

Other Variables

Variable	Description	Default
GOOGLE_API_KEY	Google API key for reverse geocoding	None
PSI_ENCRYPTION_KEY	Encryption key for encrypted storage: a PEM file path or a vault secret name. Used as a fallback when no key is passed via the -k flag and the database has no linked encryption key.	None
PHOTOSPHERE_VAULT_TYPE	Selects the vault backend: keychain (OS keychain) or plaintext (JSON files on disk)	keychain
PHOTOSPHERE_VAULT_DIR	Overrides the vault directory path (only used with the plaintext backend)	~/.config/photosphere/vault/
PHOTOSPHERE_CONFIG_DIR	Overrides the Photosphere config directory	~/.config/photosphere/
PHOTOSPHERE_LOG_DIR	Overrides the directory where log files are written	System temp directory
PHOTOSPHERE_NEWS_URL	Overrides the URL of the news feed. The desktop app checks it at startup and the CLI checks it before running a command (except news and bug). Accepts http://, https://, and file:// URLs.	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashleydavis/photosphere/main/news.yaml

Example: plaintext vault for scripting or CI

export PHOTOSPHERE_VAULT_TYPE=plaintext
export PHOTOSPHERE_VAULT_DIR=/path/to/vault

Related Configuration

• Configuration-CLI: CLI tool configuration
• Managing-Secrets: how secrets are stored and managed
• Configuration-Digital-Ocean-Spaces: setting up DigitalOcean Spaces as S3-compatible storage