Declared types - Barekey

Barekey stores values as strings, then parses them according to each variable’s declared type. That matters because await barekey.get("KEY") returns the parsed value, not just the raw string.

Supported declared types

Declared type	Returned SDK value
`string`	`string`
`boolean`	`boolean`
`int64`	`bigint`
`float`	`number`
`date`	`Date`
`json`	parsed JSON value

Creating typed variables

Examples:

barekey env new MAX_CONNECTIONS 100 --type int64
barekey env new FEATURE_ENABLED true --type boolean
barekey env new RELEASED_AT 2026-03-14T12:00:00.000Z --type date
barekey env new FEATURE_FLAGS '{"darkMode":true}' --type json

Reading typed values with the SDK

const maxConnections = await barekey.get("MAX_CONNECTIONS");
const featureEnabled = await barekey.get("FEATURE_ENABLED");
const releasedAt = await barekey.get("RELEASED_AT");
const featureFlags = await barekey.get("FEATURE_FLAGS");

Typical resolved value shapes:

MAX_CONNECTIONS -> 100n
FEATURE_ENABLED -> true
RELEASED_AT -> new Date(...)
FEATURE_FLAGS -> parsed JSON

Use `inspect()` for raw and parsed values together

const result = await barekey.get("MAX_CONNECTIONS").inspect();

result.value; // bigint
result.rawValue; // "100"
result.declaredType; // "int64"

Why declared types matter

Declared types make Barekey more useful because they:

produce better generated SDK types
reduce manual parsing in application code
make CLI and API metadata easier to understand
catch bad values earlier

Recommendation

Always set --type when creating variables unless you truly want an unstructured string value.