The 12 Factor way, is a general guideline that provides best practices when building applications. One of them is using environment variables to store application configuration.

What will we be doing:

In this post we will build a simple docker application that returns the environment variable’s value to standard out. We are using environment substitution, so if the environment variable is not provided, we will set a default value of NOT_DEFINED.

We will have the environment variable OWNER and when no value is set for that Environment Variable, the NOT_DEFINED value will be returned.

The Dockerfile

Our Dockerfile:

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FROM alpine:edge
ENV OWNER=${OWNER:-NOT_DEFINED}
CMD ["sh", "-c", "echo env var: ${OWNER}"]

Building the image:

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$ docker build -t test:envs .

Putting it to action:

Now we will run a container and pass the OWNER environment variable as an option:

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$ docker run -it -e OWNER=ruan test:envs .
env var: ruan

When we run a container without specifying the environment variable:

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$ docker run -it ruan:test
env var: NOT_DEFINED

Resources:

• https://stackify.com/config-values-docker-containers-environment-variables/
• https://tryolabs.com/blog/2015/03/26/configurable-docker-containers-for-multiple-environments/

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