It dawned on me that boostrapping with dnscontrol would be a lot easier if we provided a walk-through that first only used the BIND provider (making the creds.json file much easier to create). Then it would walk through adding an API-based provider.

Along the way it should include ways to check your json file. Suggestion: jq or run the built-in checked in Python:

echo '{"json":"obj", }' | python -m json.tool