添加环境变量以从PHP脚本访问而无需重启?

I need to access an environment variable in my php script. It's running on a remote server. I've added them to /etc/environment but I can't access them as the server needs a reboot.

They can be echoed when I run

source /etc/environment 

so it's not a problem with the file.

But the php script isn't running as my user so it doesn't have those variables. Since it's a remote server I don't particularly want to reboot it, as I assume this would then pull in the new environment variables I wrote to /etc/environment. I've seen I can use /etc/profile but that won't affect the apache user, which I assume is running the php scripts.

I've tried to run

echo exec('source /env/environment && echo $the_var');

but the variable still doesn't return.

Any ideas please? Thanks in advance