/etc/portage/package.env

' and ' are Article description::used for modifying Portage's environmental variables, such as those specified in the file, on a per-package basis.


 * The directory contains files that have the same syntax as . The filename will be used as the key to override settings.
 * The file describes which of these files will be used on a per-package basis.

Be aware certain variables in are incremental variables. This means if the variable is already specified in then Portage will read the values set in, and then read the values set in files beneath the  directory.

In other words if  in, and   in , then Portage will see FEATURES as set to   at emerge time for any packages which  is applied. This ultimately results in ccache being disabled for packages referencing in the  file.

Example 1: Enable debug information for a specific package
Suppose a user would like to build GIMP with debug information because the user wants a development version and would like to report any crashes to GIMP upstream.

Create a file in that contains the desired changes:

Next, add an entry to followed by the name of the file created in the previous step:

Example 2: Build certain packages in a different location
Suppose the Portage build directory is in tmpfs, but some packages are too large, and run out of space. The PORTAGE_TMPDIR can be modified to exclude the packages that are too large.

Create a file in that modifies PORTAGE_TMPDIR variable and sets it to an on-disk directory:

Add large packages to :

Notice that it is possible to reference several files in for each package. (Tip originally blogged by Jeremy Olexa)

Example 3: Amending an ebuild function
A package specific file in the directory could help modifying an ebuild function without creating a new ebuild repository. In this example epatch_user is added to an old EAPI 5 ebuild.

emerge --info does not show changes from package.env
According to, it is important to note that running does not show changes from the  file. This may be fixed in a future Portage release.

External resources

 * Portage man page