shopify-ai-backup/PORTAINER-QUICKFIX.md

Portainer U+200E Error - Quick Fix Guide

✅ AUTOMATIC FIX NOW AVAILABLE

Good News! Starting from the latest version, the container automatically sanitizes environment variables on startup, removing invisible Unicode characters like U+200E. This means the error should no longer occur even if you copy-paste variable names in Portainer.

However, if you're still experiencing issues or using an older image, follow the manual fixes below.

The Error

Failed to deploy a stack: unable to get the environment from the env file: 
failed to read /data/compose/42/stack.env: line 8: unexpected character "\u200e" 
in variable name "ADMIN_USER\u200e=user"

What Causes This?

Invisible Unicode characters (like U+200E "Left-to-Right Mark") get copied into your environment variable names or values. You can't see them, but they break Docker/Portainer's env file parser.

Common sources:

• ✗ Copy-pasting from web browsers
• ✗ Copy-pasting from PDFs
• ✗ Copy-pasting from Word/rich text editors
• ✗ Copy-pasting from some IDEs with formatting

Quick Fix (5 minutes)

Option 0: Rebuild/Update Your Container (Recommended)

If you're using an older version of the image, pull/rebuild to get the automatic sanitization:

# Pull latest image
docker pull your-registry/shopify-ai-builder:latest

# Or rebuild locally
cd shopify-ai
docker compose build

# Redeploy in Portainer

The new version automatically removes invisible Unicode characters on startup!

Option 1: Retype in Portainer (Manual Fix)

1. Go to your stack in Portainer
2. Click on the stack → Editor
3. Scroll to environment variables section
4. Delete ALL environment variables
5. Manually type each variable (don't paste):

   ADMIN_USER=admin
   ADMIN_PASSWORD=yourpassword
   OPENROUTER_API_KEY=yourkey
   

6. Save and redeploy

Option 2: Use Clean Template

1. Download fresh .env.example
2. Open in plain text editor (Notepad++, VS Code, Sublime, nano, vim - NOT Word!)
3. Fill in your values by typing (not pasting)
4. Copy the clean values to Portainer
5. Deploy

Option 3: Clean Existing File

If you have an existing .env file:

# 1. Validate it has problems
./scripts/validate-env.sh .env

# 2. Clean it
./scripts/clean-env.sh .env

# 3. Verify it's fixed
./scripts/validate-env.sh .env

# 4. Use the cleaned file

Prevention

Always manually type environment variable names in Portainer's web UI. Only copy-paste the values (API keys, passwords) and only from plain text sources.

Safe to copy from:

• ✓ Plain text files (.txt, .env opened in plain editor)
• ✓ Terminal output
• ✓ Password managers (usually)
• ✓ Code editors (VS Code, Sublime, vim, nano)

Unsafe to copy from:

• ✗ Web browsers (especially formatted text)
• ✗ Microsoft Word or Google Docs
• ✗ PDFs
• ✗ Some markdown renderers
• ✗ Slack/Discord (sometimes)

Verify Your Fix

After fixing, your stack should deploy successfully. Verify:

# Check container is running
docker ps | grep shopify-ai-builder

# Test the service
curl http://localhost:4000

You should see the Shopify AI App Builder homepage.

Still Having Issues?

See the full guide: PORTAINER.md

Technical Details

The U+200E character is encoded as E2 80 8E in UTF-8. Bash/sh can't parse it in variable names:

# This fails:
ADMIN_USER‎=test    # Contains invisible U+200E after R

# This works:
ADMIN_USER=test     # Clean ASCII

Docker Compose .env file format requires pure ASCII variable names. Any Unicode characters cause parsing errors.