Create Environment Variables with PowerShell

Creating environment variables in PowerShell is easy. This post will show you how to create a PowerShell environment variable which is scoped:

• Locally to your current PowerShell session.
• To your user profile and available to all other processes that you execute
• To the machine, and accessible to all processes that run on that system.

Creating a simple locally scoped PowerShell Environment Variable

To create an environment variable that is local to your current PowerShell session, simply use:

$env:SiteName = 'tachytelic.net'

Then you can check the value of the environment variable with this code:

Get-ChildItem Env:SiteName

This method is fine, but the variable will vanish when the PowerShell process ends.

Create a PowerShell Environment Variable scoped to the User

To set an environment variable which will be available to all processes that your account runs, use the following:

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('siteName','tachytelic.net',[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

Now you can see the variable is set from the Environment variables section of the system properties:

Create a PowerShell Environment Variable scoped to the Machine

To create an environment variable visible to every process running on the machine:

[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('siteName','tachytelic.net',[System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

Note: This command will probably fail unless you run PowerShell as an administrator.

The new PowerShell System environment variable is visible: