Workaround to docker run “--env-file” supplied file not being evaluated as expected

Question

My current setup for running a docker container is on the lines of this:

1. I\'ve got a main.env file:

# Main
export PRIVATE_IP=\\`echo          


        

Answer 1

I had a very similar problem to this. If I passed the contents of the env file to docker as separate -e directives then everything ran fine however if I passed the file using --env-file the container failed to run properly.

Turns out there were some spurious line endings in the file (I had copied from windows and ran docker in Ubuntu). When I removed them the container ran the same with --env or --env-file.

Answer 2

Both --env and --env-file setup variables as is and do not replace nested variables.

Solomon Hykes talks about configuring containers at run time and the the various approaches. The one that should work for you is to volume mounting the main.env from host into the container and sourcing it.

Answer 3

• Ceate a .env file

 example: test=123 val=Guru

• Execute command

docker run -it --env-file=.env bash

• Inside the bash verify using

echo $test (should print 123)

Answer 4

creating an ENV file that is nothing more than key/value pairs can be processed in normal shell commands and appended to the environment. Look at the bash -a pragma.

Answer 5

What you can do is create a startup script that can be run when the container starts. So if your current docker file looks something like this

From ...
...
CMD command

Change it to

From ...
...
ADD start.sh start.sh
CMD ["start.sh"]

In your start.sh script do the following:

export PRIVATE_IP=\`echo localhost\`
export MONGODB_HOST="$PRIVATE_IP"
export MONGODB_URL="mongodb://$MONGODB_HOST:27017/development"
command

Answer 6

I had this issue when using docker run in a separate run script run.sh file, since I wanted the credentials ADMIN_USER and ADMIN_PASSWORD to be accessible in the container, but not show up in the command.

Following the other answers and passing a separate environment file with --env or --env-file didn't work for my image (though it worked for the Bash image). What worked was creating a separate env file...

# env.list
ADMIN_USER='username'
ADMIN_PASSWORD='password'

...and sourcing it in the run script when launching the container:

# run.sh
source env.list
docker run -d \
    -e ADMIN_USER=$INFLUXDB_ADMIN_USER \
    -e ADMIN_PASSWORD=$INFLUXDB_ADMIN_PASSWORD \
    image_repo/name:tag