<p>I am a bit confused on when to a build environment variable vs a runtime environment variable in OpenShift Enterprise. Would someone please help me understand and provide example use cases for each?</p>

<p>An environment variable that might only be needed at build time is one such as to setup use of a proxy so that when building, external package repositories can be accessed, allowing dependencies to be pulled down. At runtime you probably wouldn't need that and since it may have account/password information in it, you wouldn't want to leave it defined as someone breaking into your application would find it and that may be valuable to them.</p>

<p>An environment variable that would only be set for the deployment is where a database used by the application can be found. This wouldn't generally be available at build time since the database may not have even been started at that point.</p>
