Environment variables

!!! hint "Persisting environment variables"

All environment variables can also be added to `keys.cfg` instead.
See [here](../installation/keys.md) for more information.

This page details all environment variables that are currently in use by SWE-agent.

• All API keys (for LMs and GitHub) can be set as an environment variable. See here for more information.
• SWE_AGENT_CONFIG_ROOT: Used to resolve relative paths in the config
• SWE_AGENT_ENV_LONG_TIMEOUT (default: 500): Timeout in seconds used for commands that install instance environment.
• SWE_AGENT_MODEL_MAX_RETRIES (default: 10): Maximum retries when querying the model

The following three variables can only be set as environment variables, not in the config file

• SWE_AGENT_LOG_TIME: Add timestamps to log
• SWE_AGENT_LOG_STREAM_LEVEL: Level of logging that is shown on the command line interface (TRACE being a custom level below DEBUG)
• SWE_AGENT_LOG_FILE_LEVEL: Like SWE_AGENT_LOG_STREAM_LEVEL but for the log file

!!! warning "Unstable"

The following variables might still be subject to change

• SWE_AGENT_COMMUNICATE_METHOD: Determines how SWE-agent communicates with the running process in the docker container: end-marker (default, fast) or processes (legacy, slow, more tested)
• SWE_AGENT_CLONE_METHOD: shallow (default, only retrieves relevant commit) or full (clones repository including full history). When using persistent containers or running over multiple problem statements, we fall back to full.
• SWE_AGENT_DOCKER_START_UP_DELAY: Number of seconds to wait after starting a docker container