Silence git dubious ownership error in the wp-env test environment

[westonruter]

Summary

No separate issue was filed for this.

Every npm run test-php:* command currently prints a scary-looking block before the tests run:

The repository at "/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/performance" does not have the correct ownership and git refuses to use it:

fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/performance'
To add an exception for this directory, call:

	git config --global --add safe.directory /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/performance

Composer could not detect the root package (wordpress/performance) version, defaulting to '1.0.0'.

Nothing actually fails — PHPUnit runs fine immediately afterwards — but it says fatal and is easy to mistake for a broken environment.

Relevant technical choices

The cause is specific to Docker Desktop on macOS. Inside the container, the bind-mount point itself reports as root-owned while its contents carry the host user's UID:

0:0     directory .        ← /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/performance (the mountpoint)
501:20  directory .git     ← contents, correctly mapped

Git checks the ownership of the repository directory, sees 0:0 against a process running as 501, and refuses (the safe.directory protection added in Git 2.35.2 for CVE-2022-24765). Composer shells out to git to determine the root package version — composer.json has no version key — so the error surfaces on every Composer invocation in that container.

This adds an afterStart lifecycle script registering the mount path in the container's global git config:

• --replace-all rather than --add, so repeated starts do not append duplicate entries.
• The --config=.wp-env.test.json flag is repeated because lifecycle scripts run on the host and inherit process.env but not the CLI flags. Locally overridden settings are still honored: wp-env derives .wp-env.test.override.json from the custom config path and merges it last, so the nested wp-env run targets the same containers.
• Only .wp-env.test.json needs this. .wp-env.json has no mappings entry for the repo root, so no git repository is mounted at a path where Composer runs in the development environment.
• Linux bind mounts report real ownership and never hit this, where the command is a harmless no-op.

Verified by removing the config from the container, confirming the error returned, then running npm run wp-env-test -- start and confirming both that the entry was restored and that Composer no longer emits the warning at all — it now detects the version from git as intended. npm run lint-json confirms the file still validates against https://schemas.wp.org/trunk/wp-env.json.

Use of AI Tools

This change was written by Claude Opus 5 via Claude Code, working from a real failure observed locally. The diagnosis was verified empirically inside the running container rather than assumed — including the ownership mismatch shown above, wp-env's use of docker compose exec (which is why a --global write persists), and the override-merge behavior — by reading the @wordpress/env source. The change and its reasoning were reviewed before submitting.

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Co-authored-by: westonruter <westonruter@git.wordpress.org>
Co-authored-by: adamsilverstein <adamsilverstein@git.wordpress.org>

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[adamsilverstein]

Gold star!