Environment Setup

This document explains how to configure Guardrails across different environments, from local development to production.

Supported environments

Guardrails is designed to run consistently across:

• Local development
• Staging / preview environments
• Production systems
• Serverless platforms
• Containerized infrastructure

Required environment variables

At minimum, the following environment variables must be configured:

GUARDRAILS_API_KEY=gr_live_xxxxxxxxx
GUARDRAILS_BASE_URL=https://api.guardrails.dev

Optional variables

GUARDRAILS_TIMEOUT_MS=10000
GUARDRAILS_RETRIES=0
GUARDRAILS_LOG_LEVEL=info

Environment separation

Always use separate API keys per environment:

| Environment | Key prefix | | ----------- | ----------- | | Development | gr_dev_ | | Staging | gr_stage_ | | Production | gr_live_ |

This ensures:

• Isolation of analytics
• Safer experimentation
• Clear audit trails

Local development

For local development:

cp .env.example .env.local

Never commit .env.local to source control.

CI/CD usage

In CI pipelines:

• Store secrets in the CI secret manager
• Inject variables at runtime
• Never hardcode keys in config files

Example (GitHub Actions):

env:
  GUARDRAILS_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.GUARDRAILS_API_KEY }}

Validation

To verify your setup, run a simple validation request and ensure it returns a success response.

Next steps

• Learn how Guardrails enforces security → Security
• Prepare for scale → Scaling