JSON environnement variable is seen as a string - json

Question

I'm trying to help a friend about his nodejs application.
He use NodeMailer to send emails automatically. We both use ubuntu.
To avoid any leaks, the credential for NodeMailer are set as an environnement variable called EMAIL_CREDENTIALS.
In the app, EMAIL_CREDENTIAL is called as follow:
var emailCredentials = process.env.EMAIL_CREDENTIALS;
if (emailCredentials === 'undefined') {
throw Error('Email credentials are not present');
}
// create reusable transporter object using the default SMTP transport
var transporter = nodemailer.createTransport(emailCredentials);
To set email credential I added a line in src/environnement :
EMAIL_CREDENTIALS={host:"smtp.gmail.com", port: 587, secure: false, auth: {user: "**user**", pass: "**pass**"}}
When I run some test, NodeMailer return the following error
Error: Unsupported configuration, downgrade Nodemailer to v0.7.1 to use it
at Nodemailer.sendMail (/home/**path**/node_modules/nodemailer/lib/nodemailer.js:274:18)
This error happen because type of param === 'string' in nodemailer.createTransport(param) .
My friend has been using this code for a pretty long time with no problem.
Somehow, I understand where the error come from but I would like to know how is it possible that the environnement variable of my friends setup isn't a string and mine is ? And how should I set my variable to be able to run his code without modifying it ?
EDIT: To use JSON.parse() would be a solution but I would prefer not to modifie the app code and as I said this configuration seems to work for my friend so I would like to understand where's the difference.

Answer 1

It is better not to use environment variables for other than simple values. I would suggest you to use a plain JS or JSON file with those variables, that you can simple require(). You can ignore this file via .gitignore, if you do not want it to be included in a git repository.
You can take a look at my configuration module here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/mikro-config
It is designed to be used this way.
Using it, your general configuration will be stored in /config/default.js file, and your environment specific configuration will be stored in /config/env/$NODE_ENV.js file (or in /config/env/$NODE_ENV.local.js, which should be ignored by git, as I described above).