Environment Variables

The primary ways of configuring the Appium server are via Command-Line Arguments or the Config File. 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_APPS_CACHE_IGNORE_URL_QUERY	Set this to a truthy value to remove any query part of a URL when using it as a cache key. See the corresponding feature request for more details.
APPIUM_APPS_CACHE_MAX_AGE	Set the maximum age (in minutes) for cached applications. Do not set it to a lower number than the duration of a single session startup. Default: 60 * 24 (24 hours)
APPIUM_APPS_CACHE_MAX_ITEMS	Set the maximum amount of cached applications. Do not set it to a lower number than the amount of apps in all parallel sessions per process. Default: 1024
APPIUM_HOME	Set the path to the Appium home directory, which is used for Managing Extensions. Default: .appium in the home directory of the current user
APPIUM_OMIT_PEER_DEPS	Set this to 1 to add --omit=peer to all the NPM commands run internally by Appium. Mostly an internal feature.
APPIUM_RELOAD_EXTENSIONS	Set this to a truthy value to cause Appium to re-require extensions when new sessions are created. This feature is mostly useful for building extensions.
APPIUM_TMP_DIR	Set the path to the directory used for temporary files. Same as the --tmp command line argument.

Appium drivers and plugins may define additional environment variables. The following variables are used by official plugins:

Variable	Plugin	Description
APPIUM_STORAGE_KEEP_ALL	storage	Set this to 1, true or yes to preserve files in the storage after the server process is terminated. By default, stopping the server process also deletes all files in the storage.
APPIUM_STORAGE_ROOT	storage	Set the path to the directory used for storage. If set to an existing folder, all files in it will be retained after terminating the server, unless specified otherwise using APPIUM_STORAGE_KEEP_ALL.