Environment variables and PATH not passing through in 1.2.3

[disposedtrolley]

Hello! I'm trying to test my VS Code extension which starts a language server by executing a command on the PATH, but none of the system's environment variables seem to be passing through to the test runner. This is causing my tests to fail with an ENOENT error as the executable is not able to be located on the PATH.

Despite passing in the entirety of process.env to runTests(), no environment variables are available in the test runner script specified by extensionTestsPath:

await runTests({
  extensionDevelopmentPath,
  extensionTestsPath,
  extensionTestsEnv: process.env,
  launchArgs: [extensionWorkspacePath, "--disable-extensions"]
});

In the extensionTestsPath file:

export function run(): Promise<void> {
	console.log(process.env)  // prints nothing
}

#20

[disposedtrolley]

Update: it may have something to do with nvm and how it alters the PATH when a shell is started.

Somehow I had a global installation of node in addition to an nvm one, which was conflicting with VS Code's shell (see this Stackoverflow answer)

Removing the global installations allowed me to get the production build of the extension to call the language server executable properly, but it still fails under test.

Does the Extension Development Host have its own set of shell parameters?

[disposedtrolley]

Update: a little more digging and it looks like nvm is indeed broken when running the Extension Development Host.

I get this error on startup:

nvm is not compatible with the "npm_config_prefix" environment variable: currently set to "[...]/.nvm/versions/node/v12.13.1"

Run `unset npm_config_prefix` to unset it.

which is detailed in this issue - microsoft/vscode#36987

The fix is to apply this setting:

"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.osx": []

but I'm unsure how to do it when testing.

[disposedtrolley]

Ok this appears to have fixed the issue:

await runTests({
  extensionDevelopmentPath,
  extensionTestsPath,
  extensionTestsEnv: {
    ...process.env,
    "npm_config_prefix": ""
  },
  launchArgs: [extensionWorkspacePath, "--disable-extensions"]
});

I needed to unset the npm_config_prefix env var before running tests, because I assume nvm is trying to set it on startup within the Extension Development Host.

[octref]

Glad you found a solution. I'm not very familiar with what nvm is doing.