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Environment Variables in the Manifest

Shell environment variables

It’s possible to use environment variables in your shell to populate values in your manifest files:

image:
  location: id.dkr.ecr.zone.amazonaws.com/project-name:${TAG}

Suppose the shell has TAG=version01, the manifest example will be resolved as 

image:
  location: id.dkr.ecr.zone.amazonaws.com/project-name:version01
When Copilot defines the container, it will use the image located at id.dkr.ecr.zone.amazonaws.com/project-name and with tag version01.

It is also possible to interpolate Array of Strings, from environment variables in your manifest files:

network:
  vpc:
    security_groups: ${SECURITY_GROUPS}

Suppose the shell has SECURITY_GROUPS=["sg-06b511534b8fa8bbb","sg-06b511534b8fa8bbb","sg-0e921ad50faae7777"], the manifest example will be resolved as

network:
  vpc:
    security_groups:
      - sg-06b511534b8fa8bbb
      - sg-06b511534b8fa8bbb
      - sg-0e921ad50faae7777

Info

At this moment, you can only substitute shell environment variables for fields that accept strings, including String (e.g., image.location), Array of Strings (e.g., entrypoint), or Map where the value type is String or Array of Strings (e.g., secrets).

Predefined variables

Predefined variables are reserved variables that will be resolved by Copilot when interpreting the manifest. Currently, available predefined environment variables include:

  • COPILOT_APPLICATION_NAME
  • COPILOT_ENVIRONMENT_NAME
secrets:
   DB_PASSWORD: /copilot/${COPILOT_APPLICATION_NAME}/${COPILOT_ENVIRONMENT_NAME}/secrets/db_password

Copilot will substitute ${COPILOT_APPLICATION_NAME} and ${COPILOT_ENVIRONMENT_NAME} with the names of the application and the environment where the workload is deployed. For example, when you run 

$ copilot svc deploy --app my-app --env test
to deploy the service to the test environment in your my-app application, Copilot will resolve /copilot/${COPILOT_APPLICATION_NAME}/${COPILOT_ENVIRONMENT_NAME}/secrets/db_password to /copilot/my-app/test/secrets/db_password. (For more information of secret injection, see here).

Escaping

If variable substitution is undesired, add a leading backslash:

command: echo hello \${name}
# or command: "echo \\${name}"
variable:
  name: world

In this case Copilot will not attempt to substitute ${name} with the value of the environment variable name.