Setting Up Env Vars and MCPs for VSCodium IDEs

Setting Environment Variables in VSCode and Cursor for MCP access

Not a Medium member? Click here to read this for free.

Over the past few weeks I’ve run into an annoying issue configuring VSCodium IDEs (both VSCode at home, and Cursor at work), and I thought I’d share what feels like a good solution.

Image by Gemini

The problem

The first issue I encountered was trying to build a Java project with Gradle, that required environment variables to build. The project was configured to run with IntelliJ, with a ton of (conflicting) environment variables and SDK configurations, and everyone who works on it uses Cursor for AI interactions and IntelliJ to build and run tests.

I’ll dive into the weeds of that kind of a setup in a separate article.

For now, though, getting Gradle to build and run tests in Cursor with environment variables, and without having to modify environment variables in a shell and then open Cursor from that shell, is messy.

The second issue I encountered related to MCP configurations.

If you haven’t played with MCPs already, a Model Context Protocol is essentially a plugin that lets your AI agent use configured tools (like the GitHub API)…