Environment Variables | Roboflow Docs

The Roboflow CLI and Python SDK read a small set of environment variables. Setting them in your shell or CI environment removes the need to pass credentials and configuration on every command.

A self-hosted Inference server is configured with a separate, much larger set of variables. See Inference Server Environment Variables.

`ROBOFLOW_API_KEY`

Your Roboflow API key. Used by:

CLI - every command falls back to this when --api-key / -k isn't passed.
Python SDK - roboflow.Roboflow() (with no arguments) and most adapter functions read this when no explicit key is provided.

export ROBOFLOW_API_KEY=rf_xxxxx

import roboflow

rf = roboflow.Roboflow()  # picks up ROBOFLOW_API_KEY automatically

Find your key in the Roboflow web app under Settings → API Key.

`ROBOFLOW_CONFIG_DIR`

Override the location where the CLI stores authentication credentials and the configured default workspace. Defaults to ~/.config/roboflow/.

export ROBOFLOW_CONFIG_DIR=/etc/roboflow
roboflow login
# credentials saved to /etc/roboflow/config.json

Useful in CI, container builds, or when running multiple Roboflow accounts side by side on the same machine.

`API_URL`

Override the base URL the SDK and CLI send REST API requests to. Defaults to https://api.roboflow.com.

You should not need to set this. It exists for Roboflow-internal testing against pre-production environments.

`DEDICATED_DEPLOYMENT_URL`

Override the base URL for the dedicated-deployments service. Defaults to https://roboflow.cloud.

You should not need to set this. It exists for Roboflow-internal testing against pre-production environments.

Precedence

When the same value can be supplied multiple ways, this is the order of precedence (highest first):

Explicit flag - e.g. --api-key on a CLI command, or the api_key argument to a Python function.
Environment variable - e.g. ROBOFLOW_API_KEY.
On-disk config - e.g. ~/.config/roboflow/config.json for the CLI's saved credentials.
Built-in default - only for non-secret values like API_URL.

CI / Agent recommendation

In CI or AI-agent contexts, prefer ROBOFLOW_API_KEY over roboflow login. The env var path requires no interactive prompts, no on-disk state, and rotates cleanly when you rotate the key in your secrets store.

# Example GitHub Actions
env:
  ROBOFLOW_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.ROBOFLOW_API_KEY }}