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Fixing Cloud Build / Cloud Run Error: argument --set-env-vars: Bad syntax for dict arg

Here is hot you can Fix Cloud Build / Cloud Run Error: argument --set-env-vars: Bad syntax for dict arg

While deploying a service to Google Cloud Run through Cloud Build, I ran into this error:

ERROR: (gcloud.run.deploy) argument --set-env-vars: 
Bad syntax for dict arg: [http://localhost:3000].

At first glance, the deployment config looked fine. I was passing multiple allowed origins like this:

ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://example-app.run.app,http://localhost:3000,http://localhost:3001

✅ What caused the error?

Cloud Run’s --set-env-vars flag splits values using commas.
Since the environment variable itself contained commas, Cloud Run thought I was trying to define new variables:

  • https://example-app.run.app

  • http://localhost:3000

  • http://localhost:3001

So it broke parsing and threw the error.

 The first try: wrap the value in quotes

Just add quotes around the value:

ALLOWED_ORIGINS="https://example-app.run.app,http://localhost:3000,http://localhost:3001",

Nothing changes — Couple of dev suggested this but this is not a woking solution.

✅ Working fix: escape commas using ^@^

Instead of quoting (which surprisingly did not work for Cloud Build), the fix was to escape the commas using a safe placeholder (^@^), like this:

ALLOWED_ORIGINS=^@@^https://example.run.app,http://localhost:3000,http://localhost:3001


🎉 Result

✅ Cloud Run accepts the variable
✅ No syntax error
✅ Your app still gets a proper list of origins


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