Support envfile for tasks.json

The node and Go debuggers both support specifying an env file for environment variables instead of the env hash. It would be great if we could use the same file in tasks.json to have a single source of truth that can also be used by non-vscode scripts

[ayoubserti]

Hi is there any progress on this request? I need also to define some .env variables locally to be used by tasks.json

[adriantorrie]

Need .env file support in tasks.

1. Keeps secrets out of git
2. Define my env vars in one place
3. It is a standard workflow for multiple languages to use .env file

Here is another use case:

• I was hoping to recreate this Makefile (link) in tasks.json to prevent having to install make on Windows
• However I need to pass build args from my .env file (The docker extension for VSCode isn’t flexible enough for this approach)
• Because I cant do the above: I now have to write separate docker-compose.<make step>.yml files in the meantime
• But: docker-compose doesn’t support BuildKit yet, which means I can’t bind mount local volumes into the build scope, which would allow me to export unit test results from the images at build time (also don’t get the parallel stage builds either)
• Some of the runtime arguments are secrets (i.e. docker run -e password=$PASSWORD), so there is no way they are being hard-coded into tasks.json
• So I don’t have any means to a fully-functional multi-stage build with build-time bind mounts

The above workflow example in the Makefile will be reused in our CI pipeline.

• Essentially allows our developers to run locally what will be run in the CI pipeline
• This gives us a CI pipeline agnostic approach that prevents vendor lock-in

So the only thing we’re missing at the moment is being able to give devs a clean workflow on their local computers.

** /s ** Or we tell them them to maintain both .env and tasks.json themselves and keep them out of git, and that we expect them to do this for the 50+ microservices we have built in the past 8 months, and to keep doing it for the additional ones in the future.