Travis CI and PLATFORMIO_BUILD_FLAGS

I’m unable to get Travis to compile:

I use - export PLATFORMIO_BUILD_FLAGS="-D TEMPLATE_PLACEHOLDER='~'" in my travis.yml.
The build environment recognizes this but doesn’t understand the new value of the #define. The build then fails because in the source lib it has #ifndef guards.

I want to make it as if it was #define TEMPLATE_PLACEHOLDER '~'

What it the correct syntax to have a build flag with single quotes?

Does it work when you pass -D TEMPLATE_PLACEHOLDER='~' into build_flags?