Unable to use airflow API within webserver container to do ... anything, since it can't access the backend database

[ctivanovich]

I'd like to be able to inspect things stored in the database from within the webserver container to test code that will go into DAGs, such as variables and connection details. But, for some reason, though the webserver is up and running and has access to the backend database just fine (using local executor, db is in a separate container on the same machine), the webserver container's CLI airflow API fails, and trying to do anything using Pyton's REPL (ipython) also fails, it defaults to searching for an sqllite default database, so apparently the container environment didn't get the memo that no such database was ever used. Shouldn't the airflow api be using the airflow config file/any environment variables provided to the container at launch time?