How to update container environment variables

[MarkPolivchuk]

I'm switching my application's deployment to CodePipeline and the ECS. Is there a way using this API to update the container's environment variables? Previously I was using the CLI to register the task definition as follows:

export ENVIRONMENT=$(<environment.json)
aws ecs register-task-definition --family <family_name> --task-role-arn <iam_role> --container-definitions "$ENVIRONMENT"
aws ecs update-service --cluster <cluster_name> --service <service_name> --task-definition <family_name> --region us-west-2

And whatever variables were set in environment.json would be loaded into the container. I can't find any documentation describing how to set this using CloudFormation. Any ideas?

[jpignata]

Hi! The native CodePipeline -> ECS integration will only update the container definitions' image attribute so you cannot use it to manage environment variables. Luckily, you have a couple of other options:

• You can use a Lambda function instead to drive your deployment and do something similar to the above to edit both the image and environment attributes.
• If you're using CloudFormation to manage your task definition and service, you can use these templates to manage those fields instead of the native integration. See the documentation for more details and a previous iteration of this refarch for an example.

Hope that helps!

[MarkPolivchuk]

Thank you for the quick response!