This is an idea for the next major version, and would be a breaking change.

Nowadays both variables and envs are accessed as Go template values, like this:

{{.MY_VARIABLE}}
{{.MY_ENV}}

This have a couple of drawbacks:

1. Variables need to be declared in an specific order if you want to include one into another:

FOO: foo
FOOBAR: '{{.FOO}}bar'
FOOBARBAZ: '{{.FOOBAR}}baz'

2. Variables and envs are mixed, and this often generate a bit of confusion to users.

3. Shell variables are always computed, even when they are not being used.

   • We also currently cache them, which can be annoying if the user want to calculate it again on every call. On the current implementation removing the cache would not be a good idea, though, because it would calculate these multiple times unnecessarily.

This proposal to have two template functions called var and env to access these values:

MY_VARIABLE: '{{var "MY_VARIABLE"}}'
MY_ENV: '{{env "MY_ENV"}}'

As part of these proposal, environment variables would stop being added to variables, so you need to really call env if you want an env.