I’ve been working in Java the past few years and starting back into .NET now. I’m struggling with getting my configs working as I’d like.

I want to have this structure:

• appsettings.json: default settings that are env agnostic
• appsettings.local.json: local specific config overrides
• appsettings.dev.json: dev specific config overrides
• appsettings.stage.json: stage specific config overrides

The issue I’m running into is that when the appsettings.local.json file is used (or any other env specific file), then the base values in the appsettings.json file aren’t loaded even if the appsettings.local.json file didn’t override them.

Config setup code:

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var configuration = builder.Configuration;

configuration
    .AddEnvironmentVariables()
    .Build();

appsettings.json:

{ 
...    
"Mctv": {
  "Port": "8080",
  "CORS": {
...

appsettings.local.json:

{
...
  "Mctv": {
    "Run-Environment": "local",
    "CORS": {
...

Note that the Port setting isn’t specified in the appsettings.local.json file, I want it to just use the value in the appsettings.json file.

How do I set this up so that the env agnostic config in appsettings.json is honored when not overridden by a value in an env specific config file?

Right now when I run with

"ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT": "local"

only the values in the application.local.json file are used.

EDIT

I’ve seen some posts online that state to do something like this:

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var configuration = builder.Configuration;
var environmentName = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT");

configuration
    .AddEnvironmentVariables()
    .SetBasePath(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory())
    .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", reloadOnChange: true, optional: false)
    .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{environmentName}.json", reloadOnChange: true, optional: true)
    .Build();

But I get the same behavior when I tried that.