Feature request: include environment variables from external file

[mkotsalainen]

I would like to keep my environment variables out the the supervisord.conf file for security reasons (I keep the supervisord.conf under version control. I've looked at the documentation and I don't see any way of doing this with supervisor. Am I missing something?

[mnaberez]

If you run this Python script under supervisord, it will dump its environment:

#!/usr/bin/env python -u
import os
print(os.environ)

You will see that subprocesses inherit the environment of supervisord.

If you want variables in the environment of all subprocesses but don't want to put them in supervisord.conf, you can put them into the environment before supervisord is started in your init script:

export FOO=BAR
supervisord 

If you want variables on a per-program basis, you can have supervisord start a shell script to run your program. The shell script would load the variables into the environment and then launch the program.

We have an active mailing list where you can ask questions and get tips for using Supervisor.

[mkotsalainen]

Ok thanks for the info!

[blueyed]

@mkotsalainen
You might also be interested in envdir, which calls programs using env vars from a directory: https://github.com/jezdez/envdir

[mkotsalainen]

Thanks Daniel! That’s a really smart tool.

[surjikal]

Eh it would still be nice to have an option to do this...

If I have to create a script which runs supervisor with some env variables, then it means I can't use my distro's supervisor init script.

[jvoorhis]

@surjikal Your distro's init script may already provide this capability via /etc/defaults or /etc/sysconfig.

[surjikal]

@jvoorhis Correct! Gentoo has this cool /etc/env.d thing that lets me set system wide environment variables. Works perfectly.

[tuuling]

I found the init script at: /etc/default/supervisor

[robolivable]

Use case:
A production server with 10 or so processes configured under supervisor. These processes rely on IO from a remote database to complete transactions for users. Currently, any changes to environment variables outside of the config file requires restarting the service, which could interrupt any running processes that are in the middle of transactions.

My question in this case would be, would an "external environment variable file" feature make sense here, so that variables can be defined and reread within supervisor, or is this an issue of how the child process chooses how to terminate when sent the signal?

[odedfos]

As suggested above, a simple workaround would be to wrap the target command with another script that will load the environment variables from a file.

You could have a local (or source controlled) script such as:

run_with_env.sh

#!/bin/bash

ENV_FILE="$1"
CMD=${@:2}

set -o allexport
source $ENV_FILE
set +o allexport

$CMD

And then have your supervisor command be something like this:

command=run_with_env.sh envfile some-program param1 param2

inspired by this answer on SO 30969768/1629696