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Environment Variables

You never set any of these by hand — /prism:setup writes everything for you when you install the plugin. This page is here for the times you want to look one up: checking what the plugin put in your settings, or finding where your debug log goes.

The API key is not an environment variable — the plugin reads it from apiKey in ~/.prism/config.json. See the Configuration Reference for details.

Claude Code injects these automatically. The plugin consumes them but does not set them.

VariableDescription
CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATAPer-plugin data directory. Prism keeps its managed helper and debug log here.

Debug logging isn’t an environment variable. The plugin always writes a debug log to $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA/debug.log (or ~/.prism/logs/debug.log when that directory isn’t set); to also mirror it to your terminal (stderr), set "debug": true in ~/.prism/config.json.

OTEL variables (written to ~/.claude/settings.json)

Section titled “OTEL variables (written to ~/.claude/settings.json)”

The plugin writes these on session start:

VariableValue
CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY1
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTERotlp
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTERotlp
OTEL_METRIC_EXPORT_INTERVAL10000
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOLhttp/json
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_ENDPOINT<ingest>/v1/logs
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT<ingest>/v1/metrics
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERSx-api-key=<prism_*>
OTEL_LOG_USER_PROMPTS1
OTEL_LOG_ASSISTANT_RESPONSES1
OTEL_LOG_TOOL_DETAILS1

The plugin also writes two batch-tuning variables: OTEL_BLRP_MAX_EXPORT_BATCH_SIZE (100) and OTEL_BLRP_SCHEDULE_DELAY (1000).

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT is not managed by the plugin. Claude Code does not currently emit OTLP traces through this pipeline.