#2924 Problems with environment variables taking precedence over declared ones Issue created by MeltyBot Migrated from GitLab: https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/issues/2984 Originally created by @rabidaudio on 2021-10-11 221358 --- If a plugin configuration option is set to a specific environment variable, but that config option as a default environment variable it can be configured with, and both are defined, Meltano uses the default one rather than the explicitly declared one. Example: meltano init demo meltano add extractor tap-gitlab meltano config tap-gitlab set private_token '$MY_REAL_GITLAB_API_TOKEN' export GITLAB_API_TOKEN=wrong-token export MY_REAL_GITLAB_API_TOKEN=right-token meltano config tap-gitlab

{
  "api_url": "<https://gitlab.com>",
  "private_token": "wrong-token",
  "groups": "",
  "projects": "",
  "ultimate_license": false,
  "fetch_merge_request_commits": false,
  "fetch_pipelines_extended": false
}

To me, this is unexpected behavior. I would expect

GITLAB_API_TOKEN

to be used if I hadn't specified anything for

api_url

, but since I explicitly told Meltano to use

MY_REAL_GITLAB_API_TOKEN

I'd expect that to take precedence. Proposed Solution (AJ) I think we should deprecate

env: CUSTOM_ENV_NAME

and

env_aliases: [...]

in favor of the more explicit

<plugin_name>_<setting_name>

. I've created #3120 to track this. meltano/meltano