Add environment property to the profiles in settings.json

[intractabilis]

Following @DHowett suggestion in #6585.

Description of the new feature/enhancement

For tools like MinGW you need certain environment variables to be set that define their behavior. It would be convenient to have these settings in the profile.

I suggest to add a property to the profile description in settings.json to set environment variables. For example

{
    "environment" : {
        "PATH": "c:/doomsday/emergency_commands/bin;${env:PATH}",
        "EMRGENCY_LEVEL_HIGH": "1"
    }
}

[zadjii-msft]

Yep, this seems like a good and reasonable feature request. We'll need to make sure that the ${env:PATH} syntax is well-defined. I think we're already doing some sort of env var string replacing, so we could probably just re-use that.

[mle-ii]

Glad to see this here... I just started using Windows Terminal and love it, and this was one item I was searching for in the docs on how to do. I would love to be able to set PATH here and not have to override it for all other consoles.

That said I could probably work around this by setting up a batch file to run when a console opens up. At least in my head this might be possible as I've used this for other things where I initialized the command line environment for specific tools.

[CaiB]

I got around this by making a .cmd file containing:

@echo off
cls
SET PATH=whatever
ssh me@myserver

(Just replace the ssh line with what you wanted to run)

And then in the config.json in the profile I have:

"commandline": "cmd /s /c C:/Path/To/MyFile.cmd"

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

Would "var": "" remove the environment variable or add it with an empty value? If the latter, then "var": null could remove the variable.

[rivy]

If your needs are relatively simple, a commandline statement using cmd and a compound statement is a solution which works now, eg:

"commandline": "cmd.exe /k \"set ENV_VAR=foo && set PATH=%PATH%;bar/baz\"",

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

#2785 seems to ask for the same thing, except it does not mention any ${env:PATH} or equivalent syntax.

[dolpsdw]

Terraform Example with Windows Terminal Variables
powershell
"commandline": "powershell.exe -NoExit $env:ENV_VAR='foo'; $env:Path += ';C:\\PORT\\terraform014;C:\\PORT\\apache-maven-3.6.3\\bin' ",

cmd
"commandline": "cmd.exe /k \"set ENV_VAR=foo && set PATH=%PATH%;C:\\PORT\\terraform014;C:\\PORT\\apache-maven-3.6.3\\bin\"",

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

If you have

{
    "environment" : {
        "HOMEDRIVE": "C:",
        "HOME": "${env:HOMEDRIVE}${env:HOMEPATH}",
        "HOMEPATH": "\\Users\\example"
    }
}

then should HOME use the original or new value of HOMEPATH? Should that depend on the lexical order of properties in the JSON object?

It might be easiest to implement this so that ${env:VAR} always means the original value, and the lexical order does not matter. If it becomes possible to define environment variables both globally and in each profile, then ${env:VAR} in a profile could refer to the value defined in the global environment object, and ${env:VAR} in the global environment could refer to the value received from Windows.

The syntax leaves room for adding ${new-env:VAR} with topological sorting later if needed.

[zadjii-msft]

Oh my goodness, this is a dupe of #2785, isn't it. I'll move some of the relevant discussion over to that thread. Thanks for the help triaging @KalleOlaviNiemitalo!

/dup #2785

[ghost]

Hi! We've identified this issue as a duplicate of another one that already exists on this Issue Tracker. This specific instance is being closed in favor of tracking the concern over on the referenced thread. Thanks for your report!