Atmosphere is a Powershell Core module for pushing, popping, getting, setting, updating, and importing environment variables. It currently works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's released under the MIT License.

Atmosphere is currently published on the Powershell Gallery:

Install-Module -Name Atmosphere

If you are not in an administrator powershell instance, and lack the ability to launch one, simply install into CurrentUser scope.

Install-Module -Name Atmosphere -Scope CurrentUser

Implicit module importing should handle the rest.

Atmosphere is written directly in C# for performance, and as an example for others who want to know how to write so-called "native" Powershell Modules. To build, simply use the dotnet command.

dotnet build --nologo --configuration Release

Atmosphere provides several cmdlets for use

The most basic commands are setting and getting environment variables

Set-EnvironmentVariable -Name <String> -Value <String> -Scope {Process|Machine|User}

Sets the environment variable -Name to the -Value given. Use Set-EnvironmentPathVariable if setting multiple filepaths is desired.

If -Scope is not Process and the current operating system is not Windows, it will be set to Process. The default value for -Scope is Process, and rarely needs to be specified.

Get-EnvironmentVariable -Name <Name> -Scope {Process|Machine|User}

Returns the value of the Environment Variable -Name. If no value is set, or the variable does not exist, an empty string is returned.

See Set-EnvironmentVariable for information on the -Scope parameter.

There are some environment variables where a path separator is provided. Having to constantly split these apart can be time consuming and as a result Atmosphere provides both a generalized command to receive any environment variable as a list of paths or specific well known environment variables as a list of paths.

Get-EnvironmentPath -Name PSModulePath

The following command (Get-PSModulePath) is functionally the same as the example found above.

Get-PSModulePath

Atmosphere has an internal "stack" of environment variable states. This allows users to push and pop their current state to permit temporary modifications to and rollbacks of the set of environment variables in a given powershell instance.

Push-Environment
Set-EnvironmentVariable -Name DOCKER_BUILDKIT -Value 1
<# Put Docker Related Commands Here #>
Pop-Environment

Atmosphere provides a small command to permit appending (or prepending) data to an environment variable. Additionally, we can also "import" environments, such as dotenv (.env), JSON, and PSD1 (powershell data) files.

Please note that at the moment we only support importing from a JSON file, where the expected layout is { "key": "value" }.