FAQ suggests getEnv instead of gradle provider

[xenoterracide]

this is a snippet of kotlin dsl I'm using for another plugin, I'm not sure on the groovy syntax, but this is how you should get a property. Sadly I don't fully understand it, but apparently, this is better.

  val isCI = providers.environmentVariable("CI").forUseAtConfigurationTime().isPresent
  ratchetFrom = if (isCI) "HEAD~1" else "HEAD"

[deepy]

Ooh, that's a neat feature from 6.1 that I'd missed, forUseAtConfigurationTime() makes everything safe for the configuration cache, so in general we should go for that.

For groovy I think you'd probably use .getOrNull() instead and rely on groovy's truthiness check (i.e. saving you from that moment when you set CI=false to test something without thinking it through)