Firebaseapperror：无法解析私钥：错误：pem 格式的消息无效

Question

I got this error firebaseapperror: failed to parse private key: error: invalid pem formatted message when I pushed my nodejs app to heroku.

I had my environment variables all set like this

# .env file
    
project_id=project_id
private_key='-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- ... ------END PRIVATE KEY-----\n'
client_email=client_email

And accessed them like so:

export const sa = {
    privateKey: process.env.private_key,
    projectId: process.env.project_id,
    clientEmail: process.env.client_email
};

On my local everything worked fine, but on production (heroku) I got the error mentioned above. The private key is a multiline environment variable and it couldn't be parsed.

Please, how do I fix this?

Answer 1

The Fix

How I fixed this was through a post I saw online: How to Store a Long, Multi-line Private Key in an Environment Variable

Follow the step and you should fix this as well.

Brief summary of the post is this:

Store the long, multi-line key as a json string like so

Then parse it and destruction the key like so

This would work on local, but on production (heroku) you will get a parse error because of the single quote before and after the very key in question. Therefore, remove the single quotes before and after the key in your production env variable . I also tried without the single quote on local and it worked .

Extra Benefit

Extra Benefit with this Method

From this, you could make life easy for you by doing this

Store the entire object as json string in your env variable.

Then access it like so

That's it.

Reminder: remember what I said about single quote

Answer 2

Alternatively, getting rid of single/double quotes around private_key solved it in my case. You can set private key in your prod env variables as:

-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----...-----END PRIVATE KEY-----

Answer 3

The most consistent result for me was to transform the json to base64 string and then JSON.parse(Buffer.from(process.env.CERT, 'base64').toString())