Environment Variables

brel authenticates with your forge and reads CI metadata through environment variables. The workflows generated by brel init wire these up automatically; you only need to set them yourself for local runs or hand-written pipelines.

GitHub

Variable	Used by	Description
GH_TOKEN	release-pr	GitHub token, checked first. The generated workflow sets GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}.
GITHUB_TOKEN	release-pr	Fallback when GH_TOKEN is unset.
GITHUB_EVENT_PATH	tag (event mode)	Path to the merge event payload; provided automatically by GitHub Actions.
BREL_TAG_PUSH_TOKEN	generated workflow	Repository secret holding a PAT with Contents: Read and write, required for tagging-on-merge.

Caution

Tags pushed with the default GITHUB_TOKEN do not trigger downstream tag-push workflows — that’s why tagging-on-merge needs the BREL_TAG_PUSH_TOKEN PAT. See the GitHub guide.

brel release-pr on GitHub also requires the gh CLI to be installed.

GitLab

Variable	Used by	Description
BREL_GITLAB_TOKEN	release-pr, tag (event mode)	Access token with API and repository write access. Add it as a masked CI/CD variable.
CI_API_V4_URL	release-pr, tag	GitLab API base URL, e.g. https://gitlab.com/api/v4. Provided by GitLab CI.
CI_PROJECT_ID	release-pr, tag	Numeric project ID. Provided by GitLab CI.

GitLab CI supplies further CI_* metadata (server host, project path, commit info) automatically. For local runs you must provide the essentials yourself:

BREL_GITLAB_TOKEN=... \
CI_API_V4_URL=https://gitlab.com/api/v4 \
CI_PROJECT_ID=123 \
brel release-pr

Forgejo

Variable	Used by	Description
BREL_FORGEJO_TOKEN	release-pr	Forgejo access token, checked first.
FORGEJO_TOKEN	release-pr	Second choice.
GITHUB_TOKEN	release-pr	Final fallback (Forgejo Actions exposes GitHub-compatible names).
FORGEJO_SERVER_URL / GITHUB_SERVER_URL	release-pr	Base URL of the Forgejo instance. Provided by Forgejo Actions.
FORGEJO_REPOSITORY / GITHUB_REPOSITORY	release-pr	owner/repo slug. Provided by Forgejo Actions.
FORGEJO_EVENT_PATH / GITHUB_EVENT_PATH	tag (event mode)	Path to the merge event payload.
BREL_TAG_PUSH_TOKEN	generated workflow	Secret with repository write access, required for tagging-on-merge (the automatic forgejo.token doesn’t trigger downstream tag-push workflows).

For each pair, the FORGEJO_* name wins; the GITHUB_* alias is a fallback. See the Forgejo guide.

Gitea

Gitea is currently a config value only — brel release-pr and event-mode brel tag error when provider = "gitea", so no environment variables apply yet. See the Gitea guide.