[Bug] Variable Sourcing Not Behaving As Expected

[avasomething]

One of our customers wrote in a ticket:

We are having an issue with the VSCode editor that you provided for us. When declaring an environment variable in the anaconda-project.yml, the variable isn't set even though it works fine when using the JupyterLab editor for example.
See example below of how we set the variable in the anaconda-project.yml file:

variables:
TEST_ENV:
default: Hello

On the screenshots attached, you can see the same script running on the same Anaconda project, just the editor changes between JupyterLab and VSCode, the script test_env.py and the anaconda-project.yml don't change.

Could you please have a look and maybe provide us with a fix for the VSCode editor that we have so that it sources these variables from the anaconda-project.yaml?

[AlbertDeFusco]

Yes, that specifically is a known bug and something I have thought about. I have an idea of how to provide this, but haven't started working on it yet.

[jbednar]

@AlbertDeFusco , can you clarify whether this is a bug in code we implemented, or simply a case we have not yet implemented? If the latter I wouldn't call it a bug! :-) Also, do you know a workaround, in any case?

[AlbertDeFusco]

I would classify as not implemented. I will investigate whether there is a work around.

[AlbertDeFusco]

I have a work-around. Run this in the terminal

anaconda-project run env | grep -E "`anaconda-project list-variables | sed -n '/^=.*/,$p' | tail -n +2 | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v "CONDA_PREFIX" | xargs | tr ' ' '|'`" > .env

This command creates a .env file that is used by VSCode to set environment variables when you start a shell or Jupyter Notebook. The .env file contains variables as they are set in the anaconda-project.yml file. If the variables change re-run the command and "reload the window". You can reload the window by refreshing the page or opening the command palette and search for "reload window".

I will continue to work a real implementation of this.