How to pass environment variables to a Docker container?

Set environment variable with the -e flag

The -e flag can be used to pass environment variables to a Docker container.

For example, if you want to pass the environment variable MY_ENV_VAR to the container, you can do the following:

docker run -e "MY_ENV_VAR=some_value" image-name

The -e is short for --env, so you can also use that instead:

docker run --env "MY_ENV_VAR=some_value" image-name

The -e flag can be used multiple times to pass multiple environment variables:

docker run -e "MY_VAR_1=some_value1" -e "MY_VAR_2=some_value2" -e "MY_VAR_3=some_value3" image-name

The same can be achieved with docker-compose:

docker-compose run -e MY_ENV_VAR=some_value

Set environment variable with the --env-file flag

If you want to pass a file containing all of your environment variables to a Docker container, you can use the --env-file flag.

The --env-file flag allows you to pass a file containing environment variables to a Docker container.

Let’s say that you have a .env file containing the following environment variables:

MY_ENV_VAR=some_value
MY_SECOND_ENV_VAR=some_other_value
MY_THIRD_ENV_VAR=yet_another_value

Rather than passing the environment variables directly to the container, you can pass the .env file to the container using the --env-file flag:

docker run --env-file .env image-name

Alternatively, if you are using docker-compose, you can do the same thing:

docker-compose --env-file .env up

Set environment variable within docker-compose.yml

If you are using docker-compose to manage your Docker containers, you can pass environment variables to the container using the environment key in the docker-compose.yml file.

For example:

version: '3'
services:
  my-container:
    image: image-name
    environment:
      MY_ENV_VAR: some_value
      MY_SECOND_ENV_VAR: some_other_value
      MY_THIRD_ENV_VAR: yet_another_value

For more information, see the Docker Compose documentation.

Hope that this helps!