Is there a way within

pants.toml

to specify a default for an env var if it's not set in the caller's environment?

It depends on which env variable you are looking at here. As for

GLOBAL

scope, you can get a list of variables available to set by running

./pants help-advanced global

Actually, turns out it doesn't matter for the specific case I was trying to do! I'm using the

[docker].env_vars

and that doesn't care whether env vars are set in the user environment or not.

For Docker, you can set the env variables in Dockerfile itself.

That's not what I'm trying to do.

I ran across this too. I don't think it's possible. https://pantsbuild.slack.com/archives/C046T6T9U/p1661956120178509?thread_ts=1661956120.178509&cid=C046T6T9U

I think a

pants.ci.toml

with overrides is what you'd use for CI, a

.pantsrc

for local overrides of the "main"

pants.toml

Yeah, makes sense for that use case. Turns out for what I was doing, it's fine if the variables aren't set in the environment with the

env_vars

option.