devcontainers / devcontainers/features

Standardize `containerEnv` and edits to the $PATH variable

Open
#155 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
Shell
Stars
1.5k
Forks
621
Avg merge
2d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

As seen in a recent PR (https://github.com/devcontainers/features/pull/153), the current pattern for editing important variables like `$PATH` are highly dependent on the technique the author chose to employ (editing `*rc` files, `containerEnv` properties), as well as the _order_ in which both features and the declared variables are listed.

For consistency I believe we need to find a pattern (or perhaps invent some new attribute/concept in the `devcontainer-feature.json`) that allows us to safely and consistently apply container variables in a reproducible way.

## The issue

> Copied from https://github.com/devcontainers/features/pull/153#discussion_r970164559

I think this pattern that we've adopted here (using one containerEnv inside another) -_might_ be dangerous moving forward, since I think that the order this object is emitted into the intermediate Dockerfile is important. Right now the tooling ends up emitting in the provided order

image

image

image

Notably, this output is different when using docker exec directly
image

Changing the order to:

```
"containerEnv": {
"PATH": "${PATH}:${CONDA_DIR}/bin",
"CONDA_SCRIPT":"${CONDA_DIR}/etc/profile.d/conda.sh",
"CONDA_DIR": "/opt/conda"
}
```

The auto-generated test fails:
image

image

image

image

image

cc @jungaretti @devcontainers/maintainers

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.