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Comment by nlnn | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes configuration is fairly complex (e.g. nested map data structures) which gets pretty complex with simple key/value env variables.

I'm thinking of things like config for nginx, Apache, Kubernetes, etc.

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I've had rare cases of needing nested data structures in the environment. My solution was to specify them as JSON strings and load the value in code. It works.

    USER='{
        "name": "joe",
        "email":"joe@example.com"
    }'

Indeed, I only had "simple" cases in mind. But hey... shouldn't the complex config files paths be specified through env vars ? ;)

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