# How to expand doppler env vars with a local env var value

**URL:** <https://community.doppler.com/t/how-to-expand-doppler-env-vars-with-a-local-env-var-value/1942>\
**Category:** Need Help\
**Created:** [December 16, 2025, 1:10pm UTC](https://community.doppler.com/t/how-to-expand-doppler-env-vars-with-a-local-env-var-value/1942 "2025-12-16T13:10:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ruslan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@ruslan](https://community.doppler.com/u/ruslan)\
**Post date:** [December 16, 2025, 1:10pm UTC](https://community.doppler.com/t/how-to-expand-doppler-env-vars-with-a-local-env-var-value/1942/1 "2025-12-16T13:10:08Z")

</div>

Supposedly I have a local env var (already defined before I run infisical) `POSTGRES_URL="postgres://myusername:mypassword@localhost:5432/mydatabasename"`

I want to have in the cloud env vars one which is defined as follows  
DATABASE\_URL=${POSTGRES\_URL}

But it says that env var POSTGRES\_URL value is not defined.

How to make that cloud env vars can be expanded by a local value? The use case is that some of the env vars are defined by the cloud platform (i.e.) and I don’t know them before hand.