Unable to add new environment variable to elastic beanstalk

Question

When trying to add a new environment variable to our stack with Elastic Beanstalk we got an error:

Service:AmazonCloudFormation, Message:Template format error: Parameter 'EnvironmentVariables' default value '[...

Answer 1

[Update 15/12/2016] Looks like the initial source link is not valid anymore but the answer is still true.

You can include as many properties as you want, but the total size of all properties cannot exceed 4096 bytes. You can delete a variable by leaving the value blank.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb3-setenv.html

The combined size of all environment variables defined for an environment is limited to 4096 bytes. The format of environment variables is KEY1=VALUE1, KEY2=VALUE2, which means that both the value and key of each variable are included in the total. When a platform has one or more predefined environment variables, such as JDBC_CONNECTION_STRING those variables are also included in the total.

Source: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/command-options.html