Server Environment Variables

The primary way of configuring the Appium server is via Command-Line Arguments. However, some more advanced features are toggled or configured via environment variables. To set environment variables, refer to the documentation for your operating system and terminal. These are the environment variables that the Appium server understands:

Variable	Description
APPIUM_HOME	By default, Appium creates a directory called .appium in the home directory for your system user. You can adjust the directory with this variable, as detailed in the Managing Extensions guide.
APPIUM_TMP_DIR	By default, Appium uses a random temporary directory for many of its operations. If you wish to use a specific directory, you may do so by including an absolute path as the value of this variable. The behaviour is equivalent to using the --tmp CLI arg.
APPIUM_PREFER_SYSTEM_UNZIP	Set to 0 or false to request that Appium not use the unzip binary included on your system for unzipping downloaded apps or other artifacts. Instead it will use a JS-based unzip library. This could help on some systems with non-existent or non-standard unzip commands. Note that if unzipping fails using the system library, the fallback library will be attempted in any case, so setting this env var merely saves time in the event you know the system unzip will fail.
APPIUM_HOST	Same as the --address CLI arg
APPIUM_PORT	Same as the --port CLI arg
APPIUM_RELOAD_EXTENSIONS	Set to 1 to cause Appium to re-require extensions when new sessions are created. This is mostly useful for building extensions
APPIUM_OMIT_PEER_DEPS	Adds --omit=peer to all the NPM commands run internally by Appium. Mostly an internal feature.
APPIUM_APPS_CACHE_MAX_AGE	Allows to set the maximum age (in minutes) for cached applications. The default value is 60 * 24 (24 hours). Do not set it to a lower number than the duration of a single session startup.
APPIUM_APPS_CACHE_MAX_ITEMS	Allows to set the maximum amount of cached applications. The default value is 1024. Do not set it to a lower number than the amount of apps in all parallel sessions per process.
APPIUM_APPS_CACHE_IGNORE_URL_QUERY	If the above option is enabled then the 'search' part of the app URL will be cut off from cache keys. See the corresponding
feature request
for more details. Disabled by default.