In Prefect 1 0 I want to use the env parameter of the DbtShe

Question

In Prefect 1 0 I want to use the env parameter of the DbtShellTask task to set environment variables that will be utilized by my dbt project Does anyone know how this behaves if you pass env a dictionary with values that can be lists or other dictionaries For example if I pass it the following dictionary ``` dbt env var1 value1 dbt env var2 value2 value3 value4 dbt env var3 another key value5 ``` Will prefect accept this will dbt env var2 and dbt env var3 be coercible back to their original data type in jinja or just passed as a string

Daniel Lomartra · Answer

I set up environment to test this For anyone wondering about this Prefect will error if you try to pass lists or dictionaries as values for the environment variable keys so dbt env var2 and dbt env var3 from my example You can however pass these values as a YAML string and use the fromyaml context method in jinja to parse these into the object you want example below You can pass the following in the env parameter within your flow ``` dbt env var1 value1 dbt env var2 value2 value3 value4 dbt env var3 another key value5 ``` Then in dbt convert them to a the appropriate python object primitives ``` list fromyaml env var dbt env var2 fromyaml env var dbt env var2 0 dictionary fromyaml env var dbt env var3 fromyaml env var dbt env var3 another key ``` These will compile to ``` value2 value3 value4 value2 another key value5 value5```