Docker: Using environment variables in docker-compose.yml

This documentation is part of the Deploy with GitHub Actions guide. View the full guide here: Learn how to deploy your Docker containers using GitHub Actions.

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• Easily deploy your containers to production with just a docker-compose up.
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You can define environment variables in your GitHub project that will be accessible inside your docker-compose.yml file. This is very helpful if you want to deploy to different domains (for example, staging.my-company.com for staging and my-company.com for production).

1. In GitHub, go to Settings > Environments and create an environment variable named WEBSITE_DOMAIN.
2. For the staging environment, set WEBSITE_DOMAIN to "staging.my-company.com".
3. For the production environment, set WEBSITE_DOMAIN to "my-company.com".

Next, update your .github/workflows/deploy-to-stackhero.yml file to pass the WEBSITE_DOMAIN variable to the Stackhero GitHub Action:

name: Deploy to Stackhero
description: Deploy branch "${{ github.ref_name }}" to Stackhero

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "production", "staging" ]

jobs:
  Deploy:
    environment: ${{ github.ref_name }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: stackhero-io/github-actions-deploy-docker-containers-to-stackhero@v1
      with:
        certificates_password: ${{ secrets.STACKHERO_CERTIFICATES_PASSWORD }}
        endpoint: ${{ vars.STACKHERO_ENDPOINT }}
        deployment_command: ${{ vars.STACKHERO_DEPLOY_COMMAND }}
      env:
        WEBSITE_DOMAIN: ${{ vars.WEBSITE_DOMAIN }}

Now, update your docker-compose.yml file to use the WEBSITE_DOMAIN variable instead of a hard-coded domain name:

services:
  test:
    image: nginx
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.test.rule=Host(`${WEBSITE_DOMAIN}`)" # Uses the WEBSITE_DOMAIN environment variable as the domain name.
      - "traefik.http.routers.test.tls.certresolver=letsencrypt"