bug: ${VAR} references in agent-orchestrator.yaml are not expanded

[kajirita2002]

Summary

Environment variable references like ${SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL} in agent-orchestrator.yaml are passed through as literal strings to the YAML parser. Users are forced to hardcode secrets directly in the config file, making it impossible to keep sensitive values (e.g. webhook URLs, API tokens) in environment variables.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Add an env var reference to your config:

   notifiers:
     slack:
       plugin: slack
       webhookUrl: ${SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL}

2. Set the env var: export SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL=https://hooks.slack.com/...
3. Run ao start
4. Observe that Slack notifications fail with "No webhookUrl configured" — the plugin received the literal string ${SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL} instead of the actual URL

Expected Behavior

${VAR} placeholders in agent-orchestrator.yaml should be replaced with the corresponding process.env values before YAML parsing, consistent with common config-file conventions (Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, etc.).

Actual Behavior

The raw YAML string is passed directly to parseYaml without any substitution. The plugin receives the unexpanded placeholder as its configuration value.

Root Cause

loadConfig and loadConfigWithPath in packages/core/src/config.ts use readFileSync + parseYaml with no preprocessing step. There is no regex substitution or template expansion applied to the raw YAML content.

Environment

• agent-orchestrator: main
• Node: v22.x
• macOS / Linux

Workaround

Hardcode secrets directly in agent-orchestrator.yaml (not recommended for shared or version-controlled configs).

Fix

See PR #699 which adds a raw.replace(/\$\{([^}]+)\}/g, ...) substitution pass over the raw YAML string before parsing. If the referenced env var is not set, the placeholder is left unchanged.

Related

• fix(config): expand environment variable references in YAML config #699 — fix PR