Changing the value of items under environment.variables

[MohrJonas]

I have the following block in my distrobuilder YAML file:

environment:
  variables:
    - key: user_uid
      value: "1000"
    - key: user_gid
      value: "1000"
    - key: user_name
      value: citadel
    - key: group_name
      value: citadel

How can I modify the value of these variables when using the file to build an incus image via distrobuilder build-incus?
I tried using the -o option like that:
environment.variables.user_gid=1000 and environment.variables.user_gid.value=1000
but that did not work.

[stgraber]

Ah, I don't think this is a feature we use for any of our production images, so it's likely that this was never really used/tested.

Looking at it, I'd actually be tempted to change the environment.variables to be a map[string]string instead of its current slice of struct.

Having it be a map would then make it overrideable from the command line and it would likely be a better fit anyway as an environment variable can't exactly have two values.

[MohrJonas]

Thanks for your reply. Being able to change the value of the variables from the command line would definitely be a really useful feature.

[winterheart]

Hi.
I got same troubles, and found this "semi-official" approach. Define environment like this:

environment:
  clear_defaults: true
  variables:
  - key: ENV_VAR
    value: TO_BE_REDEFINED
...

Trick is to knowing position of key that being redefining. For simplicity, put such entries at beginning. In this example ENV_VAR has index 0. So, in order to redefine it, add this options:

distrobuilder build-incus build.yaml out -o environment.variables.0.value=NEW_VALUE ...

You can redefine anything in environment, just keep index position sane, or else you got mixed keys and redefined values.