[Feature]: Read environment variables from environment with inheritance in docker container

[PatrickHuetter]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Summary

I'm using the docker image to deploy appsmith within a Kubernetes cluster. The problem I have is that it doesn't seem to be possible to set the email/smtp settings using environment variables because the docker container will always use the variables from docker.env file within the filesystem.

It would be nice if there would be some inheritance where the OS/shell environment variables that can be injected via dockers default way that take highest priority.

I don't know wether you use spring or spring boot but this is also default behavior in spring boot. You can overwrite every configuration directive by the same name as environment variable.

Why should this be worked on?

With this it would be more easy to deploy locally via docker and also to use Kubernetes pods without using a ConfigMap.

[Nikhil-Nandagopal]

@PatrickHuetter thank you for the feature request this is an interesting idea. We'll evaluate it and try to have it prioritised!

[holyachon]

This feature is also required to deploy appsmith to AWS ECS.

[grinono]

I have the same issue for ECS deployment

[bradwood]

I have the same issue for ECS deployment

same! looking forward to this too -- see https://12factor.net/config also for best practices here -- loading an environment config from a file is generally an antipattern for containerised services...

[bradwood]

Just to add to this, an environment variable should be read from the environment of the process/container and NOT from a file. Naming a file as something.env is completely wrong, as this file is really now a config file which should be something like an ini, toml, yaml or json file.

Environment variables should ONLY be read from the environment as the name suggests and they should override any setting provided by any kind of config file.

[pranavkanade]

Little more push for this feature.

[marcoacierno]

Does anyone here have any workaround for this?

[bradwood]

You can probably fix this by creating your own docker container FROM this one and then wrapping the ENTRYPOINT with a shell script that takes the environment variables and writes out the config.env before starting the process... You could do this with a template file and the envsubst command in Linux (Docker) shell script in 3/4 lines of bash I expect. But it's pretty hacky.

[areyabhishek]

Hi everyone, I have an update on this issue. We are just meeting a fix into release today and expect to have the fix live in production next week. Unfortunately COVID took a toll on our team and we've been recovering the past few weeks.

[funge]

Any update on this one? Thanks

[sharat87]

Hey, this was fixed as part of #10157. Please try it out and let us know if you face any further problems. Thanks!

[SelaOZ]

@bradwood Do you have that script by any chance?

We need this to load different environments for local, stage and prod and it would be very helpful.

[bradwood]

sorry. I don't -- I've moved on since this was on my radar and I don't use appsmith

[Nikhil-Nandagopal]

@bradwood was this the only reason why you moved on? I'd love to get some of your time top learn about your experience with the platform
https://calendly.com/appsmith-nikhil/30min