JSON in Environment Variables: Escaping, Encoding, and Parsing
Safely pass JSON in environment variables: escaping for shell, Base64 encoding, dotenv parsing, and Docker/Kubernetes secrets handling.
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Tags: json, developer-tools, devops
JSON in Environment Variables: Escaping, Encoding, and Parsing Passing a single string as an environment variable is easy. Passing a JSON object — a connection config, a list of feature flags, a nested auth config — is where things break in ways that are hard to debug. The shell eats quotes. Docker mishandles newlines. Kubernetes silently truncates values. And then your app starts with a config parse error and no clear reason why. This article covers the mechanics of getting JSON in and out of environment variables reliably. Why Shell Quoting Makes JSON Painful The core problem is that JSON uses double quotes for every key and string value, and double quotes have special meaning in most shells. Consider this config: Setting this inline in a shell command looks deceptively simple:…
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