I am switching to Rider from Visual Studio as my IDE recently and I have faced this situation where Rider is not picking up environment variable from launchSettings.json. I would like to share what I learnt.

Issue

I realized something was wrong while debugging my app where my configurations from appsettings.Development.json were not being picked up. After some chasing, I discovered the issue was caused by EnvironmentName being Production.

However, my launchSettings.json had the environmentVariables "DOTNET_ENVIRONMENT": "Development". It appears to me that Rider is not using the launchSettings.json.

Solution

Turns out, I learnt that Rider has its own run/debug configuration. Normally, it should choose the configuration with launch profile coming from launchSettings.json. However in my case, it somehow default to a different configuration, which does not take variables from launchSettings.json. The solution is to select the correct debug configuration (the one with the rocket).

I also deleted the other configuration as well because I don’t need that.

Conclusion

I hope this may help you if you have faced the same issue in Rider. I am still new to Rider and I will share my experience and any tips or tricks as I go.