These variables should be defined at a user or system level to configure blurdev.
BDEV_DESIGNERPLUG_*: Used to add a collection of designer plugins to QDesigner. Should be set to "XMLPATH,MODULE_DIR". XMLPATH is the full path to a xml file listing plugins to load. MODULE_DIR is a path that needs added to sys.path so the modules in XMLPATH are importable. You can use environment variables in these strings, they will be expanded. This is used by QDesigner, nothing else.
BDEV_OFFLINE: If set to 1, this indicates that blurdev is not running on the "Blur" network. This causes the [* Offline] section of blurdev/resource/settings.ini to override the [Default] and [*] sections. When blurdev is imported it adds all env vars defined in settings.ini for the current operating system and Default if they are not already defined in os.environ.
BDEV_PATH_PREFS: This environment variable points to where per-computer user prefs are stored.
BDEV_PATH_PREFS_SHARED: This environment variable points to where shared user prefs are stored. This is often on the network and includes the os's logged in username in the path. If BDEV_OFFLINE is set to 1 this may point to the BDEV_PATH_PREFS location.
These variables should not be defined all the time.
BDEV_DISABLE_AUTORUN: Set to "true" to disable the autorun.bat script used at blur. If this is not set when Maya shuts down, maya takes minutes to close. Maya uses several subprocess calls when closing and for some reason the doskey calls in the script take much longer than normal.
BDEV_STYLESHEET: Used to override the stylesheet when initalizing blurdev.
BDEV_TOOL_ENVIRONMENT: Forces blurdev to initialize with this treegrunt environment name. When saving prefs, this environment name change will not be saved. This is mostly used to ensure that launching a subprocess or farm job happens on the same treegrunt environment.
TRAX_SPOOL_DIRECTORY_OVERRIDE: If defined, all messages will be stored the directory of this variable. Each message filename will have a "[mapping.mount()]_" prefix added giving you a hint to which server it would have ended up on. Defining this variable effectively disables all spool messages, and gives you a way to see what each spool message would look like. If your code depends on trax.api.spool.waitForCompletion, it will never complete.
Any variable names containing a * are wildcards. This allows you to add as many instances of that environment variable type as needed.