Support for GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS in ~/.continue/.env

[Tiim]

Current Situation:
We are evaluating continue.dev with LLMs from Google Vertex AI in a dedicated cloud project. For authentication, we currently run:

gcloud auth application-default login

This command saves credentials to the default Application Default Credentials (ADC) file location, which continue.dev uses to authenticate with Google Cloud.

Problem:
The applications we are developing also require Google Cloud authentication and automatically use the same default ADC file. This creates a conflict where our applications unintentionally authenticate to the continue.dev cloud project instead of their intended project

Proposed Solution:
Allow continue.dev to respect the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable when defined in ~/.continue/.env. This would enable us to:

• Store continue.dev credentials in a separate, renamed file (e.g., continue-dev-credentials.json)
• Reference this file via GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/continue-dev-credentials.json in the .env file
• Keep the default ADC location available for our applications

Alternative Workarounds Considered:

• Intellij: in Intellij IDEA, its possible to set the environment variable for the whole IDE in Settings > Appearance & Behaviour > Path Variables > Add
• VS Code: no workaround except manually switching to the continue.dev cloud project manually before starting VS Code.