You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
1Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
ElsewhereArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.281,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
The daemon is a background process that starts and manages background jobs. When it starts a job, the request (the dispatch) can pass environment settings along. If CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR is not set in the daemon's own environment, a CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR supplied by the dispatch is now dropped with a warning unless all of these are true:
It is an absolute path
It contains no ..
It is this daemon's own config home
Adopting and reattaching to background sessions now also clean the dispatch's environment through the same kind of check, and reattachEnv is discarded.
Why
A background job cannot be pointed at an unexpected configuration folder through the dispatch. If a job ignores a config directory you passed, the warning "dropped dispatch CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR" is the place to look.
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Added sinceA small documentation edit on Hosting the Agent SDK touched a line naming CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR after this was published.* Point `CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR` at a per-tenant directory so tenants do not share the `~/.claude.json` global config. When each config directory serves one working directory and you don't pass a [`SessionStore`](/docs/en/agent-sdk/session-stor…agent-sdk/hostingsee the edit
Confirmed sinceAnthropic's documentation has since written up CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, on Environment variables.Between settings files, `env` values follow [settings precedence](/docs/en/settings#settings-precedence), so a managed settings entry overrides the same variable in user or project settings. Project and local settings can't set some variab…env-varssee the edit
How sure we are
One source agreesOne thing we can check says the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agreesAnthropic's documentation has since written up CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, on Environment variables.
