From env variables to Docker secrets

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12 Factor-app

The 3rd item of the 12 factors application manifesto tells us to store the configuration in the environnement.

The Twelve-Factor App

It also provides example of what this includes:

• Resource handles to the database, Memcached, and other backing services
• Credentials to external services such as Amazon S3 or Twitter
• Per-deploy values such as the canonical hostname for the deploy

We can wonder if this approach is still recommended today, and exempt of risk. In this article we will consider a simple application and see how it needs to be modified to handle such sensitive pieces of information in a safer way.

Applications running in a Docker world

In the last few years, we saw a lot of changes in a way applications are developed and deployed. Mainly because of the huge adoption of the Docker platform, applications are now mainly following the micro-services architecture: they are made of several services (sometimes tons of…