Eason09053360 opened a new pull request, #70944:
URL: https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/70944
`airflow variables export` followed by `airflow variables import` can
silently rewrite a variable's value and invent a description for it.
Export writes a bare value when a variable has no description, while import
treats any dict carrying a `"value"` key as a `{"value": ..., "description":
...}` envelope — nothing distinguishes the envelope from a value that happens
to look like one. Export also decodes the stored JSON, losing the difference
between raw text and a JSON-encoded string.
Round-tripping through a file on `main` :
| DB value before | exported as | after re-import |
|---|---|---|
| `{"value": "a", "description": "b"}` | `{"value": "a", "description":
"b"}` | value → `a`, description → `b` |
| `{"value": 1, "other": 2}` | `{"value": 1, "other": 2}` | value → `1`,
`other` dropped |
| `"hello"` | `hello` | `hello` — no longer valid JSON, so
`deserialize_json=True` starts raising |
Import's reconstruction is deterministic — strings are stored verbatim,
everything else is JSON-encoded, and one envelope layer is unwrapped — so
export alone can be made lossless, leaving hand-written import files behaving
exactly as before. Export now emits the stored form when the decoded value is a
string, and wraps values that are themselves envelope-shaped so import's unwrap
consumes our envelope rather than the user's data.
Exported files are unchanged for values that were never ambiguous. One
visible change worth flagging: a variable stored as a JSON-encoded string
(`Variable.set(k, "text", serialize_json=True)`) now exports as `"\"text\""`
rather than `"text"`. The old output could not be re-imported without
corruption, so there is no lossless way to keep it.
Left for follow-up PRs: import still truncates a hand-written `{"value": 1,
"other": 2}` to `1`, and the UI import path does not unwrap the envelope at all.
---
##### Was generative AI tooling used to co-author this PR?
- [X] Yes — Claude Code (Opus 5)
Generated-by: Claude Code (Opus 5) following [the
guidelines](https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/main/contributing-docs/05_pull_requests.rst#gen-ai-assisted-contributions)
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