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Managing Environment Variables

Important

Azure Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 will be retired 30 June 2022. Support for creation of new Azure Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 clusters continues through 30 November 2020. Following retirement, remaining Azure Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 clusters will be shut down to prevent security vulnerabilities.

Follow this guide to create an Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4 cluster. If you have specific questions, please contact us

Setting and Unsetting Environment Variables

Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides the oc set env command to set or unset environment variables for objects that have a pod template, such as replication controllers or deployment configurations. It can also list environment variables in pods or any object that has a pod template. This command can also be used on BuildConfig objects.

List Environment Variables

To list environment variables in pods or pod templates:

$ oc set env <object-selection> --list [<common-options>]

This example lists all environment variables for pod p1:

$ oc set env pod/p1 --list

Set Environment Variables

To set environment variables in the pod templates:

$ oc set env <object-selection> KEY_1=VAL_1 ... KEY_N=VAL_N [<set-env-options>] [<common-options>]

Set environment options:

Option Description

-e, --env=<KEY>=<VAL>

Set given key value pairs of environment variables.

--overwrite

Confirm updating existing environment variables.

In the following example, both commands modify environment variable STORAGE in the deployment config registry. The first adds, with value /data. The second updates, with value /opt.

$ oc set env dc/registry STORAGE=/data
$ oc set env dc/registry --overwrite STORAGE=/opt

The following example finds environment variables in the current shell whose names begin with RAILS_ and adds them to the replication controller r1 on the server:

$ env | grep ^RAILS_ | oc set env rc/r1 -e -

The following example does not modify the replication controller defined in file rc.json. Instead, it writes a YAML object with updated environment STORAGE=/local to new file rc.yaml.

$ oc set env -f rc.json STORAGE=/opt -o yaml > rc.yaml

Automatically Added Environment Variables

Table 1. Automatically Added Environment Variables
Variable Name

<SVCNAME>_SERVICE_HOST

<SVCNAME>_SERVICE_PORT

Example Usage

The service KUBERNETES which exposes TCP port 53 and has been allocated cluster IP address 10.0.0.11 produces the following environment variables:

KUBERNETES_SERVICE_PORT=53
MYSQL_DATABASE=root
KUBERNETES_PORT_53_TCP=tcp://10.0.0.11:53
KUBERNETES_SERVICE_HOST=10.0.0.11

Use the oc rsh command to SSH into your container and run oc set env to list all available variables.

Unset Environment Variables

To unset environment variables in the pod templates:

$ oc set env <object-selection> KEY_1- ... KEY_N- [<common-options>]

The trailing hyphen (-, U+2D) is required.

This example removes environment variables ENV1 and ENV2 from deployment config d1:

$ oc set env dc/d1 ENV1- ENV2-

This removes environment variable ENV from all replication controllers:

$ oc set env rc --all ENV-

This removes environment variable ENV from container c1 for replication controller r1:

$ oc set env rc r1 --containers='c1' ENV-