Environment variables

The CLI honors a small set of environment variables.

Variable	Type	Effect
ORION_API_URL	URL	Override the developer-API base URL the CLI normally derives from your host config. Useful when running against a non-standard staging deployment or a local proxy. Read by dev, publish, sandbox, and versions (everything that goes through deriveDeveloperApiUrl). The OAuth flow used by login, whoami, apps, and doctor derives its URL directly from host and does not consult this variable — set host correctly via orion config host for those commands.
ORION_NO_UPDATE_NOTIFIER	1	Disable the once-per-day update check entirely. The notifier defaults to ON.
CI	true	Auto-detected on most CI runners (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, etc.). When set, the update notifier silently no-ops so build logs aren't polluted.
VITE_ORION_API_URL	URL	Used by the legacy-graphql template's GraphQL client (src/lib/graphql-client.ts) to derive the GraphQL endpoint, not the SMART scaffold. The CLI doesn't read this directly.

Examples

Send orion publish to a specific API host

ORION_API_URL=https://api.dev.orionsoftware.io/api/v1 orion publish

This sends the upload directly to the URL you specify instead of the one derived from your host config. Be careful — most users should never need this. Misconfiguration here can publish to the wrong environment.

CI run that should never see the upgrade notifier

# .github/workflows/publish.yml
env:
    ORION_NO_UPDATE_NOTIFIER: '1'

(Or just rely on CI=true, which most runners set automatically.)

Local dev against a self-hosted Orion instance

export ORION_API_URL=https://api.orion.local/api/v1
orion dev
orion publish --dry-run

ORION_API_URL only steers the commands that talk to the developer API (dev, publish, sandbox, versions). For orion login, orion auth whoami, orion apps *, and orion doctor, set host via orion config host instead — those commands derive their URLs from the host config directly.