Passing environment variables to a docker container using docker-compose

Suppose you have a containerized script which you want behave differently based on configuration. Let’s see how to do that!

2 min read

I’m doing a complete revision of our backup verification system, and I’m trying to automatize checks whenever possible.

Automation is good for a variety of reason:

  • it can be carried out by a machine (you can schedule it);
  • it is less error prone;
  • it avoids password and password files around systems.

What I’ve done

  • I’ve written a Python application, which does a lot of things automatically.
  • I’ve built a container in order to execute it
  • I needed to parametrize the execution, as we use Borg Backup which I want to verify with a different schedule and policy than the regular database backup.

Step 0: Define what you need

I need to pass two parameters to the script:

  • if I want to run borg verify
  • what is the store to verify.

Let’s define BORG (integer) to enable the verification and STORE (string) to select the store we want to verify.

Step 1: Declare environment variables in docker-compose.yml

environment:
  - BORG=${BORG:-0}
  - STORE=${STORE:-}

This will collect BORG and STORE env variables from the command line, using 0 and "" as default values.

Step 2: Use env variables into the Dockerfile

Actually, this is complex that you would expect. Initially, I’ve used a naive approach: I put the script call directly into the ENTRYPOINT.

We need a wrapper here in order to evaluate variables. So, I’ve replaced my existing ENTRYPOINT with a call to /usr/bin/run.sh, which is a simple bash script.

Add it to the container as follows:

COPY ./run.sh /usr/bin/run.sh
RUN chmod +x /usr/bin/run.sh

Let’s take a look to run.sh

#!/bin/sh
if [ ${BORG} -eq 1 ]; then 
  python app -b ${STORE}
else
  python app
fi

Build the container with docker-compose build

Step 3: Call the container with environment variables as parameters

You can now call the container using environment variables as follows:

BORG=1 STORE="catserver" docker-compose up

Done :)

Related