How to pass environment variables from WebUI into secondary image with multi-image docker executor

Build Environment
,
1

Hello,

Is it possible to pass environment variables set in the WebUI of CircleCI into the service image ?

Here is an example:

  • MY_ENV is defined in the config.yaml

  • MY_CI_ENV is defined in the WebUI

  • My_CI_ENV2 is the previous envar reset into the config.yaml

    version: 2                                                                  
jobs:                                                                       
  test:                                                                     
    docker:                                                                 
      - image: alpine:latest                                                
      - image: mongo:latest                                                 
        command: sh -c "env; echo MY_ENV=${MY_ENV};echo MY_CI_ENV=${MY_CI_ENV}"
        environment:                                                        
          - MY_ENV: bonjour

  environment:                                                            
    - MY_ENV: hello                                                       
    - MY_CI_ENV2: ${MY_CI_ENV}                                            
  steps:                                                                  
    - run:                                                                
        name: echo1                                                       
        command: echo ${CIRCLE_BRANCH}                                    
    - run:                                                                
        name: echo2                                                       
        command: echo ${MY_ENV}                                           
    - run:                                                                
        name: echo3                                                       
        command: echo ${MY_CI_ENV}                                        
    - run:                                                                
        name: echo4                                                       
        command: echo ${MY_CI_ENV2} 

workflows:                                                                  
version: 2                                                                
  just_do_it_now:                                                           
    jobs:                                                                   
      - test

The output of the service image (mongo):

HOSTNAME=d42f6c3814ea
SHLVL=0
HOME=/root
NO_PROXY=127.0.0.1,localhost,circleci-internal-outer-build-agent
MY_ENV=bonjour
GPG_KEYS=9DA31620334BD75D9DCB49F368818C72E52529D4
TERM=xterm
MONGO_PACKAGE=mongodb-org
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
MONGO_MAJOR=4.0
JSYAML_VERSION=3.10.0
MONGO_REPO=repo.mongodb.org
GOSU_VERSION=1.10
PWD=/
MONGO_VERSION=4.0.3
MY_ENV=bonjour
MY_CI_ENV=

And here is the output of the “echo4”:

${MY_CI_ENV}

2

Yep, try this:

https://discuss.circleci.com/t/reference-an-environment-variable-in-environment-yaml-map/10792

3

@halfer
This is what I tried and didn’t work, as posted before:

  environment:                                                            
    - MY_ENV: hello                                                       
    - MY_CI_ENV2: ${MY_CI_ENV}  
[...]
 steps: 
[...]
    - run:                                                                
        name: echo4                                                       
        command: echo ${MY_CI_ENV2}

And output was:

${MY_CI_ENV}

4

Hello, this here will not work, the value in the config is read as a string directly. No interpolation exists for the config file. But this should be correct:

      - image: mongo:latest                                                 
        command: sh -c "env; echo MY_ENV=${MY_ENV};echo MY_CI_ENV=${MY_CI_ENV}"
        environment:                                                        
          - MY_ENV: bonjour

Here, in the second image MY_ENV should be bonjour, as this is a static string everything should work fine. If you try to echo the value of MY_ENV though you will not see this because the echo command is executed in the first container only.

I do think there may be a need for a secure way to insert information into the secondary container and I am not sure I can easily provide a solution for that at the moment.

I would highly recommend creating a post on our Ideas Portal for a feature suggestion. This sounds like a fairly valuable feature we should consider.
https://circleci.com/ideas/