From cfa506b5cbd0c5dd98250038a8ee1eed63db04d9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Fabio <open-dynaMIX@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2017 21:31:20 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] extend documentation in regard to environment variables

---
 README.md | 34 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 34 insertions(+)

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index f14de31..c455b40 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -386,6 +386,40 @@ Note that dotdrop uses different delimiters than
 * comment start = `{#@@`
 * comment end = `@@#}`
 
+## Available variables
+### Profile
+
+`{{@@ profile @@}}` contains the profile being used. Below in the example you can see how this is useful.
+
+### Environment variables
+
+It's possible to access environment variables inside the templates. You can utilize this functionality like this:
+
+```
+{{@@ env['MY_VAR'] @@}}
+```
+
+This allows for storing host-specific properties and/or secrets as environment variables.
+
+You can have an `.env` file in the directory where your `config.yaml` lies:
+
+```
+# My variables for this host
+var1="some value"
+var2="some other value"
+
+# Some secrets
+pass="verysecurepassword"
+```
+Of course, this file should not be tracked by git (put it in your `.gitignore`).
+
+
+Then you can invoke dotdrop with the help of an alias like that:
+```
+alias dotdrop='eval $(cat ~/dotfiles/.env | egrep -v "^#") ~/dotfiles/dotdrop.sh'
+```
+This loads all the variables from `.env` (while omitting lines starting with `#`) before calling `~/dotfiles/dotdrop.sh`.
+
 # Example
 
 Let's consider two hosts: