Cursor Devcontainer: Lifecycle commands does not work with symlinked dotfiles

[thibaut-lo]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

On the Anysphere Devcontainer extension,

The shell used by the Devcontainer Lifecyle commands do not evaluate the dotfiles in my host (e.g for zsh: .zshenv and .zprofile or .zshrc depending on whether it uses a login shell or interactive) if we use symlinked dotfiles.

This is a typical setup if we version-control our dotfiles (example: Managing dotfiles with GNU Stow | Bastian Venthur's Blog )

Steps to Reproduce

• Create a ~/dotfiles/.zshrc that “export TOTO=1” (in the host, not in the containerized repo)
• Symlink ~/.zshrc to ~/dotfiles/.zshrc
• Add a devcontainer with “initializeCommand”: “echo $TOTO” (use a str, not an array to get a shell)

It won’t echo anything

Expected Behavior

It should echo 1.

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.5.11
Commit: 2f2737de9aa376933d975ae30290447c910fdf40
Date: 2025-09-05T03:48:32.332Z
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Cursor/1.5.11 Chrome/132.0.6834.210 Electron/34.5.8 Safari/537.36

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes

[thibaut-lo]

Hi @ravirahman

This is the root cause of what i reported in
* Dev container: where to put environment variables when sourced locally and used in initializeCommand

Anysphere Devcontainer extension: Error resolving dev container authority [devcontainer up] is still present though