grpc/doc/environment_variables.md

gRPC environment variables
--------------------------

gRPC C core based implementations (those contained in this repository) expose
some configuration as environment variables that can be set.

* http_proxy
  The URI of the proxy to use for HTTP CONNECT support.  Does not currently
  support username or password information in the URI.

* GRPC_ABORT_ON_LEAKS
  A debugging aid to cause a call to abort() when gRPC objects are leaked past
  grpc_shutdown(). Set to 1 to cause the abort, if unset or 0 it does not
  abort the process.

* GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
  The path to find the credentials to use when Google credentials are created

* GRPC_SSL_CIPHER_SUITES
  A colon separated list of cipher suites to use with OpenSSL
  Defaults to:
    ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

* GRPC_DEFAULT_SSL_ROOTS_FILE_PATH
  PEM file to load SSL roots from

* GRPC_POLL_STRATEGY [posix-style environments only]
  Declares which polling engines to try when starting gRPC.
  This is a comma-separated list of engines, which are tried in priority order
  first -> last.
  Available polling engines include:
  - epoll (linux-only) - a polling engine based around the epoll family of
    system calls
  - poll - a portable polling engine based around poll(), intended to be a
    fallback engine when nothing better exists
  - legacy - the (deprecated) original polling engine for gRPC

* GRPC_TRACE
  A comma separated list of tracers that provide additional insight into how
  gRPC C core is processing requests via debug logs. Available tracers include:
  - api - traces api calls to the C core
  - bdp_estimator - traces behavior of bdp estimation logic
  - call_error - traces the possible errors contributing to final call status
  - channel - traces operations on the C core channel stack
  - combiner - traces combiner lock state
  - compression - traces compression operations
  - connectivity_state - traces connectivity state changes to channels
  - channel_stack_builder - traces information about channel stacks being built
  - http - traces state in the http2 transport engine
  - http1 - traces HTTP/1.x operations performed by gRPC
  - flowctl - traces http2 flow control
  - op_failure - traces error information when failure is pushed onto a
    completion queue
  - round_robin - traces the round_robin load balancing policy
  - glb - traces the grpclb load balancer
  - queue_pluck
  - queue_timeout
  - server_channel - lightweight trace of significant server channel events
  - secure_endpoint - traces bytes flowing through encrypted channels
  - timer - timers (alarms) in the grpc internals
  - transport_security - traces metadata about secure channel establishment
  - tcp - traces bytes in and out of a channel
  - DEBUG builds only:  
    * metadata - tracks creation and mutation of metadata
    * closure - tracks closure creation, scheduling, and completion
    * pending_tags - traces still-in-progress tags on completion queues
    * queue_refcount
    * error_refcount
    * stream_refcount
    * workqueue_refcount
    * fd_refcount
    * auth_context_refcount
    * security_connector_refcount
    * resolver_refcount
    * lb_policy_refcount
    * chttp2_refcount

  'all' can additionally be used to turn all traces on.
  Individual traces can be disabled by prefixing them with '-'.

  Example:
  export GRPC_TRACE=all,-pending_tags

* GRPC_VERBOSITY
  Default gRPC logging verbosity - one of:
  - DEBUG - log all gRPC messages
  - INFO - log INFO and ERROR message
  - ERROR - log only errors

* GRPC_DNS_RESOLVER
  Declares which DNS resolver to use. The default is ares if gRPC is built with
  c-ares support. Otherwise, the value of this environment variable is ignored.
  Available DNS resolver include:
  - native (default)- a DNS resolver based around getaddrinfo(), creates a new thread to
    perform name resolution
  - ares - a DNS resolver based around the c-ares library