Introduce project-level environment variables

[gtsiolis]

Problem to solve

The product currently supports only user-level environment variables set in user settings, where you use a scope syntax to specify for which projects the variable should be available to use. See /variables and relevant docs.

With the upcoming Teams & Projects features, it will be able to set up a project and share this project configuration with other team members under a team.

Proposal

Given there's also a plan to add project and team settings, it could make sense to add support for project-level environment variables or even team-level environment variables. This could also protect variables from being accidentally deleted or changed, and more as these could be read-only to non-owner members.

TBD (To be discussed)

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[ntziolis]

Any updates?

[gtsiolis]

Hey @ntziolis! FYI, We've added this feature request on the roadmap[1] for the next quarter. 🗺️

[ntziolis]

Great to hear. This is currently blocking us from adopting the gitpod way of doing things.

Since we cannot use prebuilds (private npm registry), each dev currently creates a single pinned workspace per project and reuses it. This is because creating a new workspace per issue would take too long without prebuilds.

[shaal]

+1 for this feature.
@gtsiolis Adding a team member (and giving them access to secret), happens through access to the repo on Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket? or I need to add a team member to the repo, and then additional steps in the Projects interface inside Gitpod website?

[ntziolis]

I would prefer to keep gitpod teams and github teams separate. We have third party devs that are working on code that doesn't need access to the secrets and we would like them to continue to not have access to them.

That said, I could see this being solved by

• making this auto-add configurable (meaning one can turn it off when this is not wanted)
• extending the gitpod browser extension that adds an additional button to the add team memeber section on github/gitlab etc (add to github and gitpod team)
• and/or via a notification to the gitpod admin whenever there is a new github team member added so he can take action

[AlCalzone]

It would already be immensely helpful to be able to define (public) env variables in .gitpod.yml without any UI whatsover.

Our repo is using yarn to manage dependencies. The repo is configured to use a global yarn cache, but this does not work with gitpod prebuilds because only /workspace is persisted.

So we're changing the yarn config in the prebuilds to use a local (persisted) cache, but without extra steps does not carry over to workspaces spawned from the prebuilds. To avoid changing the config files, we need to set environment variables for each workspace. This can be done with startup scripts, but is currently very repetitive. With two startup tasks, we need to do this:

tasks:
  - name: "Task 1"
    before: |
      # set env variables for this terminal
      export YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=".yarn/cache"
      export YARN_ENABLE_GLOBAL_CACHE="false"

      # Persist the env variables for other terminals
      echo "export YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=\".yarn/cache\"" >> ~/.bashrc
      echo "export YARN_ENABLE_GLOBAL_CACHE=\"false\"" >> ~/.bashrc
    # ... rest of task 1

  - name: "Task 2"
    openMode: split-right
    before: |
      # set env variables for this terminal
      export YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=".yarn/cache"
      export YARN_ENABLE_GLOBAL_CACHE="false"
    # ... rest of task 2