Passing environment variables to ShinyProxy containers with the Docker operator

ShinyProxy
1

Hi,

I’m using the ShinyProxy Operator 2.3.1 with the pure Docker setup (no Kubernetes) and it works great.

I have secrets (OpenID client secret, API keys, DB passwords) that I’d like to reference in my ShinyProxy YAML config using ${VAR_NAME} syntax rather than hardcoding them. For example:

proxy:
  openid:
    client-secret: ${MY_CLIENT_SECRET}
  specs:
    - id: my_app
      container-image: my-registry/my-app
      container-env:
        DB_PASSWORD: ${MY_DB_PASSWORD}
        API_KEY: ${MY_API_KEY}

With the actual values defined in a .env file or similar mechanism.

The challenge is that the operator creates a separate container for each ShinyProxy instance, and that container doesn’t seem to inherit environment variables from the operator container. So even if I load a .env file via env_file: in docker-compose.yml, the variables are only available inside the operator container, not in the ShinyProxy containers it spawns.

Hardcoding the values directly in the YAML works fine as a workaround, but ideally I’d like to keep secrets separate from the configuration structure.

Is there a way to pass custom environment variables to the ShinyProxy containers created by the Docker operator? Or is this something that might be supported in the future?

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Hi

Thanks for opening this topic and sharing your idea.
Better management of secrets will be available in the next release of the operator.
See Pass environment variables to created shinyproxy instance when using DockerOperator · Issue #66 · openanalytics/shinyproxy-operator · GitHub (and the linked PR for more info).

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