docs(cli): dev --env-file values reach your tasks

[BILLKISHORE]

Closes #4425

The --env-file docs snippet says the file only hydrates the CLI's process.env and not the tasks. That's true for deploy and preview archive, but not for dev: DevSupervisor.#getEnvVars() passes args.envFile into resolveLocalEnvVars, so the file ends up in the run environment.

The snippet is shared by four pages, so I reworded it to cover both cases instead of splitting it. I added the same fact to trigger dev --help, which was silent on it. dev archive --help already said "CLI process" and is correct, so it's untouched.

I fixed the docs rather than changing dev, since the behavior has shipped for a long time and people rely on --env-file reaching tasks. Happy to flip it the other way if you'd rather dev matched the old wording.

✅ Checklist

• I have followed every step in the contributing guide
• The PR title follows the convention.
• I ran and tested the code works

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Testing

Built the CLI and checked both help outputs:

$ node packages/cli-v3/dist/esm/index.js dev start --help
--env-file <env file>    Path to the .env file to use for the dev session. Values are also
                         passed to your tasks. Defaults to .env in the project directory.

$ node packages/cli-v3/dist/esm/index.js dev archive --help
--env-file <env file>    Path to the .env file to load into the CLI process. Defaults to
                         .env in the project directory.

Also ran pnpm run format, pnpm run lint and pnpm run build --filter trigger.dev.

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Changelog

trigger dev --help and the CLI docs now say that --env-file values are passed to your tasks, not just the CLI process.

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Screenshots

n/a

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Two things I noticed reading this, left alone since they're separate issues:

• In resolveLocalEnvVars the dotenv values are spread last, so --env-file overrides the environment variables set in the dashboard. That may be intended, but it isn't documented.
• docs/cli-switch.mdx includes this snippet, but switch.ts has no --env-file option.

[changeset-bot]

🦋 Changeset detected

Latest commit: 146c35f

The changes in this PR will be included in the next version bump.

This PR includes changesets to release 27 packages

Name	Type
trigger.dev	Patch
@internal/dashboard-agent	Patch
@trigger.dev/build	Patch
@trigger.dev/core	Patch
@trigger.dev/python	Patch
@trigger.dev/react-hooks	Patch
@trigger.dev/redis-worker	Patch
@trigger.dev/rsc	Patch
@trigger.dev/schema-to-json	Patch
@trigger.dev/sdk	Patch
@trigger.dev/database	Patch
@trigger.dev/otlp-importer	Patch
@trigger.dev/rbac	Patch
@trigger.dev/sso	Patch
@internal/cache	Patch
@internal/clickhouse	Patch
@internal/llm-model-catalog	Patch
@internal/metrics-pipeline	Patch
@internal/redis	Patch
@internal/replication	Patch
@internal/run-engine	Patch
@internal/run-store	Patch
@internal/schedule-engine	Patch
@internal/testcontainers	Patch
@internal/tracing	Patch
@internal/tsql	Patch
@internal/sdk-compat-tests	Patch

Not sure what this means? Click here to learn what changesets are.

Click here if you're a maintainer who wants to add another changeset to this PR

[github-actions]

Hi @BILLKISHORE, thanks for your interest in contributing!

This project requires that pull request authors are vouched, and you are not in the list of vouched users.

This PR will be closed automatically. See https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

[coderabbitai]

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 8f66af6 and 146c35f.

📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• .changeset/env-file-dev-tasks-help.md
• docs/snippets/cli-options-env-file.mdx
• packages/cli-v3/src/commands/dev.ts

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Walkthrough

Updated --env-file descriptions in the dev command and CLI documentation. The text now states that dev passes loaded variables to tasks, while other commands only hydrate the CLI process environment. Added a patch changeset for trigger.dev.

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests

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