Environment files with new line support

[SiNONiMiTY]

Feature request description

Support loading of environment variable files with new line via --env-file, just like how DotEnv does it.

DotEnv Multiline Feature

Currently, loading environment files with values that span multiple lines don't work.
This is a very useful feature that I would like to be implemented.

[Luap99]

Adding support for this sounds good to me as long as it is backwards compatible with the existing parsing logic.

[hedayat]

Is there any workarounds for this?

[Luap99]

pass the env on the cli with --env?

[hedayat]

Not sure if it is practical enough for me. Actually I'm using podman-compose, and with multiple big env files, and it doesn't work currently because of this missing feature. Currently, I'm forced to go back to docker/docker-compose for this use case, which is not what I preferred.

[SiNONiMiTY]

Not sure if it is practical enough for me. Actually I'm using podman-compose, and with multiple big env files, and it doesn't work currently because of this missing feature. Currently, I'm forced to go back to docker/docker-compose for this use case, which is not what I preferred.

Same here, I am more inclined to use the CLI rather than the podman/docker compose, and --env-file switch not parsing multiline environment variables is such a bummer.

[Luap99]

This is an open source project we always welcome PRs from the community.

[github-actions]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[Luap99]

The change got reverted as it broke backwards compat.

[hedayat]

Oops, now it breaks docker-compose compatibility... :(

[hedayat]

If you want to keep backward compatibility to that extent, what about adding a new flag for using multi-line environment files?

[Luap99]

Note that the current behaviour is actually docker compatible. docker != docker-compose, docker run --env-file parses the file in the same format as we do. And you can just use docker-compose against the podman socket so there should not be an issue there as the file is always parsed on the client.
As for podman-compose you would need to ask there, podman-compose is not maintained by us.

Adding a new flag with a new format is certainly a possibility

[hedayat]

Yeah, you are correct.

Adding a new flag with a new format is certainly a possibility

Can we proceed with this option instead?