Environment Variables used by MapServer

A number of environment variables can be used to control MapServer's behavior or specify the location of some resources. We try to list all of them here with either short documentation or a pointer to the relevant documentation.

Note that some of these variables can also be set via a CONFIG directive in a mapfile, but not all of them.

MS_MAPFILE

Default mapfile to use if the map=... URL parameter is not provided

map=ENV_VAR

It is possible to use an environment variable name as the value of the map=... parameter in a mapserv CGI URL. The value of this environment variable will be used as the mapfile path.

MS_MAPFILE_PATTERN

MS_MAP_PATTERN

MS_MAP_NO_PATH

(Added in 5.4.0)

MS_MODE

Default value for the mode=... CGI parameter. Setting mode=... in the URL takes precedence over the environment variable.

MS_ERRORFILE

MS_DEBUGLEVEL

(Added in 5.0.0)

MS_ENCRYPTION_KEY

(Added in 4.10). See ​http://www.mapserver.org/utilities/msencrypt.html

PROJ_LIB

CURL_CA_BUNDLE

(Added in 5.4.1) Used to specify the location of the Certificate Authority (CA) bundle file to be used by Curl when using HTTPS connections in WMS/WFS client layers. Curl comes bundled with its own CA bundle by default, so this variable is not required unless you have an unusual installation.

export CURL_CA_BUNDLE=/path/to/ca-bundle.crt