❯ Guillaume Laforge

Day 10 with Workflows — Accessing built-in environment variables

google-cloud workflows

Google Cloud Workflows offers a few built-in environment variables that are accessible from your workflow executions.

There are currently 5 environment variables that are defined:

  • GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_NUMBER: The workflow project’s number.
  • GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID: The workflow project’s identifier.
  • GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION: The workflow’s location.
  • GOOGLE_CLOUD_WORKFLOW_ID: The workflow’s identifier.
  • GOOGLE_CLOUD_WORKFLOW_REVISION_ID: The workflow’s revision identifier.

Let’s see how to access them from our workflow definition:

- envVars:
    assign:
      - projectID:  ${sys.get_env("GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID")}
      - projectNum:  ${sys.get_env("GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_NUMBER")}
      - projectLocation:  ${sys.get_env("GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION")}
      - workflowID:  ${sys.get_env("GOOGLE_CLOUD_WORKFLOW_ID")}
      - workflowRev:  ${sys.get_env("GOOGLE_CLOUD_WORKFLOW_REVISION_ID")}
- output:
    return:  ${projectID  +  " "  +  projectNum  +  " "  +  projectLocation  +  " "  +  workflowID  +  " "  +  workflowRev}

We use the built-in sys.get_env() function to access those variables. We’ll revisit the various existing built-in functions in later episodes.

Then when you execute this workflow, you’ll get an output like this:

"workflows-days 783331365595 europe-west4 w10-builtin-env-vars 000001-3af"

There’s one variable I’d like to see added to this list, that would be the current execution ID. That could potentially be useful for identifying a particular execution, when looking in the logs, to reason about potential failure, or for auditing purposes.