Docker Ubuntu environment variables - bash

During the build stage of my docker images, i would like to set some environment variables automatically for every subsequent "RUN" command.
However, I would like to set these variables from within the docker conatiner, because setting them depends on some internal logic.
Using the dockerfile "ENV" command is not good, because that cannot rely on internal logic. (It cannot rely on a command run inside the docker container)
Normally (if this were not docker) I would set my ~/.profile file. However, docker does not load this file in non-interactive shells.
So at them moment I have to run each docker RUN command with:
RUN bash -c "source ~/.profile && do_something_here"
However, this is very tedious (and unclean) when I have to repeat this every time I want to run a bash command. Is there some other "profile" file I can use instead.

you can try setting the arg as env like this
ARG my_env
ENV my_env=${my_env}
in Dockerfile,
and pass the 'my_env=prod' in build-args so that you can use the set env for subsequent RUN commands
you can also use env_file: option in docker compose yml file in case of a stack deploy

I had a similar problem and couldn't find a satisfactory solution. What I did was creating a script that would source the variables, then do the operation. I would then rewrite the RUN commands in the Dockerfile to use that script instead.
In your case, if you need to run multiple commands, you could create a wrapper that loads the variables, runs the command given as argument, and include that script in the docker image.

Related

Run bash then eval command on Docker container startup

I’m setting up a docker container to just be a simple environment for Ocaml, since I don’t wanna have to manage two OPAM tool chains on two computers. (Windows desktop, Linux laptop) My goal is to have the container load in to a bash command prompt on docker-compose run with ocaml ready to go, and to do this I need to enter in to bash and then run eval $(opam env) on startup. This is my current docker file:
FROM ocaml/opam:alpine-3.12
# Create folder and assign owner
USER root
RUN mkdir /code
WORKDIR /code
RUN chown opam:opam /code
USER opam
# Install ocaml
RUN opam init
RUN opam switch create 4.11.1
RUN opam install dune
# bash env
CMD [ "/bin/bash" ]
ENTRYPOINT [ "eval", "\$(opam env)" ]
Building and trying to run this gives me the error:
sh: $(opam env): unknown operand
ERROR: 2
I tried making a run.sh script but that ran into some chmod/permission issues that are probably harder to debug than this. What do I do to open this container in bash and then run the eval $(opam env) command? I don’t want to do this with command line arguments, I’d like to do this all in a dockerfile or docker-compose file
The trick is to use opam exec1 as the entry point, e.g.,
ENTRYPOINT ["opam", "exec", "--"]
Then you can either run directly a command from the installed switch or just start an interactive shell with run -it --rm <cont> sh and you will have the switch fully activated, e.g.,
$ docker run -it --rm binaryanalysisplatform/bap:latest sh
$ which ocaml
/home/opam/.opam/4.09/bin/ocaml
As an aside, since we're talking about docker and OCaml, let me share some more tricks. First of all, you can look into our collection of dockerfiles in BAP for some inspiration. And another important trick that I would like to share is using multistage builds to shrink the size of the image, here's an example Dockerfile. In our case, it gives us a reduction from 7.5 Gb to only 750 Mb, while still preserving the ability to run and build OCaml programs.
And another side note :) You also should run your installation in a single RUN entry, otherwise your layers will eventually diverge and you will get weird missing packages errors. Basically, here's the Dockerfile that you're looking for,
FROM ocaml/opam2:alpine
WORKDIR /home/opam
RUN opam switch 4.11.1 \
&& eval "$(opam env)" \
&& opam remote set-url default https://opam.ocaml.org \
&& opam update \
&& opam install dune \
&& opam clean -acrs
ENTRYPOINT ["opam", "exec", "--"]
1)Or opam config exec, i.e., ENTRYPOINT ["opam", "config", "exec", "--"] for the older versions of opam.
There's no way to tell Docker to do something after the main container process has started, or to send input to the main container process.
What you can do is to write a wrapper script that does some initial setup and then runs whatever the main container process is. Since that eval command will just set environment variables, those will carry through to the main shell.
#!/bin/sh
# entrypoint.sh
# Set up the version-manager environment
eval $(opam env)
# Run the main container command
exec "$#"
In the Dockerfile, make this script be the ENTRYPOINT:
COPY entrypoint.sh /usr/local/bin
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/local/bin/entrypoint.sh"]
CMD ["/bin/bash"]
It also might work to put this setup in a shell dotfile, and run bash -l as the main container command to force it to read dotfiles. However, the $HOME directory isn't usually well-defined in Docker, so you might need to set that variable. If you expand this setup to run a full application, the entrypoint-wrapper approach will will there too, but that sequence probably won't read shell dotfiles at all.
What you show looks like an extremely straightforward installation sequence and I might not change it, but be aware that there are complexities around using version managers in Docker. In particular every Dockerfile RUN command has a new shell environment and the eval command won't "stick". I'd ordinarily suggest picking a specific version of the toolchain and directly installing it, maybe in /usr/local, without a version manager, but that approach will be much more complex than what you have currently. For more mainstream languages you can also usually use e.g. a node:16.13 prebuilt image.
What's with the error you're getting? For ENTRYPOINT and CMD (and also RUN) Docker has two forms. If something is a JSON array then Docker runs the command as a sequence of words, with one word in the array translating to one word in the command, and no additional interpretation or escaping. If it isn't a JSON array – even if it's mostly a JSON array, but has a typo – Docker will interpret it as a shell command and run it with sh -c. Docker applies this rule separately to the ENTRYPOINT and CMD, and then combines them together into a single command.
In particular in your ENTRYPOINT line, RFC 8259 §7 defines the valid character escapes in JSON, so \n is a newline and so on, but \$ is not one of those. That makes the embedded string invalid, and therefore the ENTRYPOINT line isn't valid, and Docker runs it via a shell. The single main container command is then
sh -c '[ "eval", "\$(opam env)" ]' '/bin/bash'
which runs the shell command [, as in if [ "$1" = yes ]; then ...; fi. That command doesn't understand the $(...) string as an argument, which is the error you're getting.
The JSON array already has escaped the things that need to be escaped, so it looks like you could get around this immediate error by removing the erroneous backslash
ENTRYPOINT ["eval", "$(opam env)"] # won't actually work
Docker will run this as-is, combining it with the CMD, and you get
'eval' '$(opam env)' '/bin/bash'
But eval isn't a "real" command – there is no /bin/eval binary – and Docker will pass on the literal string $(opam env) without interpreting it at all. That's also not what you want.
In principle it's possible to do this without writing a script, but you lose a lot of flexibility. For example, consider
# no ENTRYPOINT; shell-form CMD
CMD eval $(opam env) && exec /bin/bash
Again, though, if you replace this CMD with anything else you won't have done the initial setup step.

the bashrc file is not working when I docker run --mount bashrc

I'm testing an app on docker (search engine) but when I use docker run the bashrc doesn't work if for example there was an alias inside bashrc, I can't use it.
The file bashrc is copied to the container but still can't use it.
My question is why not? is it only because that bashrc needs to be reloaded or there is another reason?
sudo docker run \
--mount type=bind,source=$(pwd)/remise/bashrc,destination=/root/.bashrc,readonly \
--name="s-container" \
ubuntu /go/bin/s qewrty
If you start your container as
docker run ... image-name \
/go/bin/s qwerty
when Docker creates the container, it directly runs the command /go/bin/s qwerty; it does not invoke bash or any other shell to do it. Nothing will ever know to look for a .bashrc file.
Similarly, if your Dockerfile specifies
CMD ["/go/bin/s", "qwerty"]
it runs the command directly without a shell.
There's an alternate shell form of CMD that takes a command string, and runs it via /bin/sh -c. That does involve a shell; but it's neither an interactive nor a login shell, and it's invoked as sh, so it won't read any shell dotfiles (for the specific case where /bin/sh happens to be GNU Bash, see Bash Startup Files).
Since none of these common paths to specify the main container command will read .bashrc or other shell dotfiles, it usually doesn't make sense to try to write or inject these files. If you need to set environment variables, consider the Dockerfile ENV directive or an entrypoint wrapper script instead.

Running one script in different environment

I am just wondering is that possible to run one script (e.g. shell script, python script, etc.) in different environments?
For example, I want to run my script from Linux shell to docker container shell (which the container is created by the script)? In other words, keep the script executing the rest of commands on container (after into the container).
run.sh (#shell script)
sudo docker exec -it some_containers bash #this command will lead me to docker container environment
apt-get install curl # I want to also execute this command inside the docker container after I enter the docker container environment
# this is just one script
Your question is not very clear, but it sounds like this is a job requiring two scripts - the first script runs in your "Linux shell", and needs to cause the second script to be placed into the container (perhaps by way of the dockerfile), at which point you can have the first script use docker exec.
Please see the answers on this question for more information.

running a bash client at docker creation to set an environment variable

From examples I've seen one can set environment variables in docker-compose.yml like so:
services:
postgres:
image: my_node_app
ports: -8080:8080
environment:
APP_PASSWORD: mypassword
...
For security reasons, my use case requires me to fetch the password from a server that we have a bash client for:
#!/bin/bash
get_credential <server> <dev-environment> <role> <key>
In docker documentation, I found this, which says that I can pass in shell environment variable values to docker compose. So I can run the bash client to grab the passwords in my starting shell that creates the docker instances. However, that requires me to have my bash client outside docker and inside my maven project.
Another way to do this would be to run/cmd/entrypoint a bash script that can set environment variable for the docker instance. Since my docker image runs node.js, currently my Dockerfile is like this:
FROM node:4-slim
MAINTAINER myself
# ... do Dockerfile stuff
# TRIAL #1: run a bash script to set the environment varable --- UNSUCCESSFUL!
COPY set_en_var.sh /
RUN chmod +x /set_en_var.sh
RUN /bin/bash /set_en_var.sh
# original entry point
#ENTRYPOINT ["node", "mynodeapp.js", "configuration.js"]
# TRIAL #2: use a bash script as entrypoint that sets
# the environment variable and runs my node app . --- UNSUCCESSFUL TOO!
ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint.sh"]
Here is the code for entrypoint.sh:
. mybashclient.sh
cred_str=$(get_credential <server> <dev-environment> <role> <key>)
export APP_PASSWORD=( $cred_str )
# run the original entrypoint command
node mynodeapp.js configuration.js
And here is code for my set_en_var.sh:
. mybashclient.sh
cred_str=$(get_credential <server> <dev-environment> <role> <key>
export APP_PASSWORD=( $cred_str )
So 2 questions:
Which is a better choice, having my bash client for password live inside docker or outside docker?
If I were to have it inside docker, how can I use cmd/run/entrypoint to achieve this?
Which is a better choice, having my bash client for password live inside docker or outside docker?
Always have it inside. You don't want dependencies on the host OS. You want to avoid that situation as much as possible
If I were to have it inside docker, how can I use cmd/run/entrypoint to achieve this?
Consider the below line of code you used
RUN /bin/bash /set_en_var.sh
This won't work at all. Because you don't make any change to the docker container as such. You just run a bash which gets some environment variables and then the bash exits and nothing on the OS gets changes. Dockerfile build will only maintain changes that happened to the OS from that command. And in your case except for that session of the bash, nothing changes.
Next your approach to do this during the build time is also not justified. If you build it with the environment variables inside it then you are breaking the purpose of having a command to fetch the latest credentials. Suppose your change the password, then this would require you to rebuild the image (in case it had worked)
Now your entrypoint.sh approach is the right one and it should work. You should just check what is going wrong with it. Also echo the cred_str for your testing to make sure you are getting the right credentials detail back from the command
Last you should change the line
node mynodeapp.js configuration.js
to
exec node mynodeapp.js configuration.js
This makes sure that your node process becomes the PID 1.

Reuse inherited image's CMD or ENTRYPOINT

How can I include my own shell script CMD on container start/restart/attach, without removing the CMD used by an inherited image?
I am using this, which does execute my script fine, but appears to overwrite the PHP CMD:
FROM php
COPY start.sh /usr/local/bin
CMD ["/usr/local/bin/start.sh"]
What should I do differently? I am avoiding the prospect of copy/pasting the ENTRYPOINT or CMD of the parent image, and maybe that's not a good approach.
As mentioned in the comments, there's no built-in solution to this. From the Dockerfile, you can't see the value of the current CMD or ENTRYPOINT. Having a run-parts solution is nice if you control the upstream base image and include this code there, allowing downstream components to make their changes. But docker there's one inherent issue that will cause problems with this, containers should only run a single command that needs to run in the foreground. So if the upstream image kicks off, it would stay running without giving your later steps a chance to run, so you're left with complexities to determine the order to run commands to ensure that a single command does eventually run without exiting.
My personal preference is a much simpler and hardcoded option, to add my own command or entrypoint, and make the last step of my command to exec the upstream command. You will still need to manually identify the script name to call from the upstream Dockerfile. But now in your start.sh, you would have:
#!/bin/sh
# run various pieces of initialization code here
# ...
# kick off the upstream command:
exec /upstream-entrypoint.sh "$#"
By using an exec call, you transfer pid 1 to the upstream entrypoint so that signals get handled correctly. And the trailing "$#" passes through any command line arguments. You can use set to adjust the value of $# if there are some args you want to process and extract in your own start.sh script.
If the base image is not yours, you unfortunately have to call the parent command manually.
If you own the parent image, you can try what the people at camptocamp suggest here.
They basically use a generic script as an entry point that calls run-parts on a directory. What that does is run all scripts in that directory in lexicographic order. So when you extend an image, you just have to put your new scripts in that same folder.
However, that means you'll have to maintain order by prefixing your scripts which could potentially get out of hand. (Imagine the parent image decides to add a new script later...).
Anyway, that could work.
Update #1
There is a long discussion on this docker compose issue about provisioning after container run. One suggestion is to wrap you docker run or compose command in a shell script and then run docker exec on your other commands.
If you'd like to use that approach, you basically keep the parent CMD as the run command and you place yours as a docker exec after your docker run.
Using mysql image as an example
Do docker inspect mysql/mysql-server:5.7 and see that:
Config.Cmd="mysqld"
Config.Entrypoint="/entrypoint.sh"
which we put in bootstrap.sh (remember to chmod a+x):
#!/bin/bash
echo $HOSTNAME
echo "Start my initialization script..."
# docker inspect results used here
/entrypoint.sh mysqld
Dockerfile is now:
FROM mysql/mysql-server:5.7
# put our script inside the image
ADD bootstrap.sh /etc/bootstrap.sh
# set to run our script
ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/sh","-c"]
CMD ["/etc/bootstrap.sh"]
Build and run our new image:
docker build --rm -t sidazhou/tmp-mysql:5.7 .
docker run -it --rm sidazhou/tmp-mysql:5.7
Outputs:
6f5be7c6d587
Start my initialization script...
[Entrypoint] MySQL Docker Image 5.7.28-1.1.13
[Entrypoint] No password option specified for new database.
...
...
You'll see this has the same output as the original image:
docker run -it --rm mysql/mysql-server:5.7
[Entrypoint] MySQL Docker Image 5.7.28-1.1.13
[Entrypoint] No password option specified for new database.
...
...

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