Support multi-line environment variables in stacks and services.

[mrmachine]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I am unable to edit the environment variables for services that currently have one or more multi-line environment variables. The form input is a single line, and my multi-line variable (e.g. DEFAULT_SSL_CERT for https://github.com/docker/dockercloud-haproxy) is collapsed into a single line without even \n to separate the lines. If I save any updates to the environment section, this environment variable will be corrupted.

I'm also unable to add multi-line value to the environment section when creating a stack. The reason why I'd like to do this is to keep a single compose file for dev/staging/prod environments, paste in multi-line secrets to the environment section and list them in the stack as FOO: (to get from environment).

Describe the solution you'd like

• Any existing multi-line environment variables to be displayed in a multi-line textarea so they can be updated without being corrupted.
• Click a button near the delete button that swaps a single-line input for a multi-line textarea, so I can enter new multi-line values. This button should be disabled if the current value contains any new lines.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Values could be escaped so new lines are rendered as \n then restored on save. But this is really ugly and difficult to update. E.g. before copying in a new cert or other value I'd need to manually escape the newlines, and hope that there's no legitimate \n in my value or else escape those too.

Additional context
Multi-line values are easy to add via pasted stack file, but the resulting services won't be update-able. Also services created outside portainer with a multi-line value will not be update-able. For example, when setting up a new cluster I deploy HAproxy first then portainer, so that I only ever access portainer via HTTPS. Because there's no stack for HAproxy, I can only update it via the service page which will corrupt the value. If I deployed HAproxy as an external stack (via CLI, before portainer is deployed), this is also still not editiable in portainer.

[deviantony]

I've referenced another issue related to the container creation view but with the same problem. We'll track this enhancement.

[Chuckame]

After 6.5 years, is this issue fixable ? It becomes a pain to setup certificates in env vars for gitops mode in a stack, especially when the app is not able to decode base64 or unescape \n.

[LucidDan]

Is there any reason not to do a simple fix for this by changing the text boxes for environment variable values to textareas? Should the fix be something more sophisticated than that? I've made this change locally on my own fork and it appears to work.

[JamesArthurHolland]

Any update on this?

[mwmw7]

not yet??

[HellLeaf]

Please, when this bug will be fixed? "Environment variables" list in service is not showing the multiline variables and upon saving/modyfing any of the env data this variable is removed at all...

[ZVilusinsky]

Was hit by this today (json passed through) env variable, I see we are closing on 6th year anniversary of the original issue.

[eliphaslevy]

Just got hit by this bug too. I think this "Idea" category is fitting by the subject, but the UI at least should ignore the multi-line variables and do not remove it when updating the service.

[ukasyah-dev]

Well, I guess I need to encode the multi-line value using base64.

[relu91]

Just got hit by this bug too. I think this "Idea" category is fitting by the subject, but the UI at least should ignore the multi-line variables and do not remove it when updating the service.

Maybe this could be filled as an issue? I'm not sure discussions like this are taken into account in the roadmap.

[eliphaslevy]

There is this issue from Apr/2021...
I just defaulted to using base64 -w0 with gzip/zstd/xz so the line stay within reasonable width.