How to access environment variables set by docker run from monit controlled processes inside the container

Question

I'm using monit to start (and monitor) several processes inside of a container. Unfortunately monit runs the processes with a very stripped down environment so anything coming from docker run --env ... is not seen by the process that monit starts. In other environments I would just make sure to source /etc/environment or ~/.bash_profile in the process so get the environment setup.

But docker run --env doesn't have any equivalent AFAIK. Besides having to have a wrapper around monit the creates the monit configuration file or creates /etc/environment is there a way to access these environment variables coming from docker?

Answer 1

just thinking outloud here. just before you run monit, you could collect the environment variables that it has access to. For example:

env | sed 's/^/export /' > /tmp/monit.save.sh

then, later on, when you 'start' in the monit configuration, you could source that file in a bash shell, just like you talked about sourcing /etc/environment. So, just before you start the monit program, source the /tmp/monit.save.sh, then run your program. That will give the monit 'start'ed program access to the environment variables that were passed to the docker container.

however, i may have just described the wrapper you are trying to avoid, sorry if that's the case.