determine best approach for env variables in docker

[elrayle]

Description

Determine how best to provide username, password, service and database connection info to docker in a way that prevents the info going into GitHub.

Background

We currently store users, password, service and database info in .env files. Examples for docker put this info directly in the docker-compose.yml file. This file has valuable setup information that we want to store in GitHub, but we don't want to store the private env file info.

Approaches to explore

• docker secret
• environment variables
• use of .env files with docker
• Yale has a section in the web definition in the docker-compose.yml that includes a reference to .env and .secret

The approach should be compatible with deployment on localhost, dev-vm server, and AWS server.

[elrayle]

For local development on a Mac laptop, the environment variables' attr-value pairs are stored in a .env file at the root of the cloned qa_server_container application. The README has instructions for Getting Started. Expected environment variables are defined in .env.example.

We are working to determine the best way to set these for deploy in AWS.