Environment Variables

Sinaptic® DROID+ config files support ${ENV_VAR} substitution. Any value in droid.yaml or agent configs can reference an environment variable.

.env File

Sinaptic® DROID+ automatically loads a .env file from the working directory at startup. Variables set in the environment take precedence over .env values.

# .env
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
GEMINI_API_KEY=AIza...
GROK_API_KEY=xai-...

LLM Provider Keys

Variable	Provider	Required
OPENAI_API_KEY	OpenAI (default)	Yes (if using OpenAI)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Anthropic (Claude)	Yes (if using Anthropic)
GEMINI_API_KEY	Google Gemini	Yes (if using Gemini)
GROK_API_KEY	xAI Grok	Yes (if using Grok)

Local providers (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp) do not require API keys.

Runtime Variables

Variable	Description	Default
DROID_CONFIG	Path to the main config file	./droid.yaml
DROID_DATA_DIR	Path to the data directory	./data

Usage in Config

Reference any environment variable with ${VAR} syntax:

llm:
  api_key: ${OPENAI_API_KEY}

server:
  api_key: ${DROID_API_KEY}

mcp:
  servers:
    my-server:
      env:
        TOKEN: ${MY_SERVICE_TOKEN}

If an environment variable is not set, the ${VAR} string is left as-is (not expanded). This means the config value will be the literal string ${VAR}, which will likely cause an authentication error — making it easy to spot missing variables.