Configure environment variables in the Helm chart

How to use commonEnv and extraEnv to configure environment variables across LangSmith services in the Helm chart.

The LangSmith Helm chart provides two ways to inject environment variables into services: commonEnv and extraEnv. Understanding the difference between them helps you configure your deployment correctly and avoid runtime errors.

commonEnv

commonEnv is a top-level field in values.yaml that applies to all deployments and statefulsets except the playground and aceBackend services, which are sandboxed and do not receive commonEnv values.

Use commonEnv when a variable must be available to most services simultaneously, such as custom CA certificate paths, proxy settings, or feature flags that affect the entire platform.

commonEnv:
  - name: MY_ENV_VAR
    value: "my-value"

Services that receive commonEnv

The following services receive commonEnv:

• backend
• platformBackend
• queue
• ingestQueue
• frontend
• hostBackend

Services that do not receive commonEnv

The following services are sandboxed and do not receive commonEnv:

• playground
• aceBackend

To set environment variables on these services, use their extraEnv directly:

playground:
  deployment:
    extraEnv:
      - name: MY_ENV_VAR
        value: "my-value"

aceBackend:
  deployment:
    extraEnv:
      - name: MY_ENV_VAR
        value: "my-value"

extraEnv

extraEnv is a per-service field that adds environment variables to a specific service only. Each service that supports extraEnv exposes it under <service>.deployment.extraEnv.

Use extraEnv when a variable applies to one service only, or when you need to set a variable on playground or aceBackend that commonEnv does not reach.

backend:
  deployment:
    extraEnv:
      - name: MY_BACKEND_VAR
        value: "backend-value"

No duplicate variable names

The chart uses a detectDuplicates helper to validate environment variable names for each service. If the same variable name appears more than once in the combined list of variables for a service (including those added from commonEnv, extraEnv, and chart-managed variables), Helm fails during template rendering with an error like:

Duplicate keys detected: [MY_ENV_VAR]

To resolve this, remove the duplicate from either commonEnv or the service’s extraEnv so each variable name appears exactly once per service.

Chart-managed variables (set internally by the Helm chart) count toward duplicate detection. Do not add a variable name to commonEnv or extraEnv if the chart already manages that variable. Review the chart values file to see which variables the chart sets by default.

Example: set a variable on most services but override it on one

To use a common value for most services while overriding it for a specific service, set it in commonEnv and add the override to that service’s extraEnv. Because playground and aceBackend do not receive commonEnv, you must always set variables for those services through their own extraEnv.

# Apply to all services that receive commonEnv
commonEnv:
  - name: SSRF_ALLOW_K8S_INTERNAL
    value: "true"

# playground does not receive commonEnv — set it directly
playground:
  deployment:
    extraEnv:
      - name: SSRF_ALLOW_K8S_INTERNAL
        value: "true"
      - name: SSRF_ALLOW_PRIVATE_IPS_PLAYGROUND
        value: "true"

Related pages

• Configure LangSmith for scale
• Playground environment settings
• LangSmith Helm chart values.yaml

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