2025-10-25 Sat

• DevContainer
  • #Learned that .devcontainer/devcontainer.local.json can have just those keys you wish to locally override form .devcontainer/devcontainer.json. I tested it and it works.
    • that said, I can't find any official docs for this approach. It might be an internal hack of vscode, because I found it via vscode deepwiki - can I override env var locally.
  • VSCode Advanced Containers - Environment variables
    • vscode-docs/remote/advancedcontainers/environment-variables.md at main · microsoft/vscode-docs · GitHub

      • Add the containerEnv property to devcontainer.json to set variables that should apply to the entire container or remoteEnv to set variables for VS Code and related sub-processes (terminals, tasks, debugging, etc.):
        

      • "containerEnv": {
        "MY_CONTAINER_VAR": "some-value-here",
        "MY_CONTAINER_VAR2": "${localEnv:SOME_LOCAL_VAR}"
        },
        "remoteEnv": {
        "PATH": "${containerEnv:PATH}:/some/other/path",
        "MY_REMOTE_VARIABLE": "some-other-value-here",
        "MY_REMOTE_VARIABLE2": "${localEnv:SOME_LOCAL_VAR}"
        }

      • As this example illustrates, containerEnv can reference local variables and remoteEnv can reference both local and existing container variables.