Support process-compose override

[natebrunette]

What problem are you trying to solve?

I want individual developers to be able to override aspects of the process-compose file.

What solution would you like?

Support reading from the process-compose.override.yml file if it exists.

Alternatives you've considered

No response

[mootoday]

One way I've done that for some teams is to use whoami to dynamically load the correct:

devbox services up --process-compose-file ./config/devbox/process-compose/$(whoami).yaml

When you have multiple people with the same laptop name, you can expand on that concept with env variables that are unique per developer.

[boostvolt]

I did some digging and found that devbox services up currently ignores any process-compose.override.yaml files. Looking at the CLI code in https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox/blob/5ad68fa84de7f6e95792435084967e7bdded523f/internal/services/config.go#L63-L84

the lookupProcessCompose function only checks for:

• process-compose.yaml
• process-compose.yml

But it doesn't include override files that process-compose natively supports.

I've created a reproduction repository https://github.com/boostvolt/devbox-plugins-override with two test cases:

• test/override-compose: Basic override functionality test
• test/plugins-override-compose: Plugin-based override test

When running via devbox services up, the override files are ignored. However, when running directly via process-compose, everything works as expected.

---

Current Workaround: For plugin situations, we're now using this approach in devbox.json:

"up": "process-compose -f .devbox/virtenv/one/process-compose.yaml -f .devbox/virtenv/two/process-compose.yaml -f process-compose.override.yaml up"

This feature would be valuable for allowing individual developers to customize their local development environment without affecting the shared configuration.

[janbiasi]

After a brief look at the code, @boostvolt and I discovered that this is already possible via the --pc-flags, for example:

devbox services up --pcflags -f=process-compose.overrides.yml

I think this workaround is quite fine for now, but I'd expect to get a built-in way to configure such flags within the devbox.json file. Are there any opinions from contributors/maintainers on how we could expose such a configuration within the devbox.json file to developers?

edited: typo --pc-flags -> --pcflags