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Pipeline environment variable valid characters

Douglas Lovell

We are getting the message, "A variable value contains an illegal string or character" from Bitbucket Pipeline.

The Environment Variable Document, unless I missed it, doesn't mention any limits on values. It doesn't say anything about escaping characters in the values.

What characters are not valid? Are there any escaping mechanisms?

Accepted answers

All comments

davina

Hi Douglas,

If you scroll down on that documentation page to "User variables", you will see a few limitations:

Names can only contain ASCII letters, digits and underscores
Names are case-sensitive
Names can't start with a digit

Hope this helps!

gusrub

Hey @davina I'm having exactly the same issue. I do not see any illegal characters on my env vars.

Opening the validator shows this:

Screenshot from 2017-07-30 16-20-40.png

I even tried to use the env vars without the double quotes to no avail, still getting this:

Screenshot from 2017-07-30 16-18-37.png

I do have, of course, the referenced variables defined in my environment variables page set.

Is this a known issue... something we are doing wrong perhaps?

I love to have the pipelines integrated with the source control but unfortunately storing the credentials on the YAML is not an option as you'd guess.

Thanks in advance!

gusrub

Just to add to the conversation: using the ENV VARS within the pipelines section works; I added the following as the last command of the pipeline for instance:

echo "Database name is $DB_NAME"

And it does output in the log the database name, so it seems that only when using env vars in the definitions section they are not properly parsed:

Screenshot from 2017-07-30 17-33-39.png

davina

Hi @gusrub,

Yes you're right, under our official documentation "Defining a service" you'll see:

Note - the environment section must contain only literal values, not environment variables.

I will raise a bug against the validator - it should say it is invalid.

Cheers,

Davina

gusrub

Oh, snap!, I missed that but still, the validator should not be green as you say. Thanks for the quick response!

danielcooperxyz

This problem had me confused for a while. Is it true that we cannot set env vars in the definitions with env vars from the pipeline settings?

Lee Richmond

I'm confused, so what is the point of allowing us to create user-defined ENV vars is we can't actually use them? If anything using them in the pipelines.yml file seems like the ONLY place you would want to use them...

Cristtopher Quintana T._nzxhv5

For real? I have more than 18 intents and then read this...

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