| Home | Libraries | People | FAQ | More

## Accessing environment variables

Many users would like to use environment variables in Jamfiles, for example, to control location of external libraries. In many cases you better declare those external libraries in the site-config.jam file, as documented in the recipes section. However, if the users already have the environment variables set up, it's not convenient to ask them to set up site-config.jam files as well, and using environment variables might be reasonable.

In Boost.Build V2, each Jamfile is a separate namespace, and the variables defined in environment is imported into the global namespace. Therefore, to access environment variable from Jamfile, you'd need the following code:

    import modules ;
    local SOME_LIBRARY_PATH = [ modules.peek : SOME_LIBRARY_PATH ] ;
    exe a : a.cpp : <include>$(SOME_LIBRARY_PATH) ;