Using environment variables in a Dockerfile
Overview
Your application may need to call environment variables during its build step - particularly if your build has multiple, dependent stages. A common way of achieving this is to add these calls to your Dockerfile. We explain how to achieve this below, and give examples.
Calling an environment variable in a Dockerfile
You can pull the value of an environment variable from your Cloud 66 account into a Dockerfile using the ENV command and the format $NAME_OF_KEY. Note that the key name must be capitalized. For example the following:
ENV WEB_IP "$WEB_ADDRESS_INT"
…would pull the internal IP address of the application’s webserver into the Dockerfile and assign it to a local variable named “WEB_IP”.
Note that this assumes that the environment variable you are calling already exists in your Cloud 66 application. If it doesn’t, this call will result in a build error.
You can also use the following format if you don’t need to set the output as a variable and just need the value of the key for another operation.
RUN echo $WEB_ADDRESS_INT
Pulling binaries into your Dockerfile using env_vars
It’s possible to add small binary files (30KB or smaller) to your application during the build step using a combination of Base64 encoding and environment variables. To do so:
- Hash the file using
cat filename.ext | base64and copy the resulting hash (it may be very long, so take care). - Paste it into a new env_var in your Cloud 66 application dashboard
- Add a RUN command to your Dockerfile. For example:
RUN echo $QR_CODE | base64 -D > /var/www/QR-code.png
This will create a PNG called QR-code under the /var/www directory with the output of the base64 decoding.
For step 1 you can also use this method: base64 -i filename.ext -o hashfilename
…if you’d prefer to output the hash as a file. This often makes it easier to copy the entire hash value (rather than copying from the terminal).
