feature request: make all flags env vars

[atlantisbot]

Issue by @robertlabrie
Thursday Oct 19, 2017 at 18:00 GMT
Migrated from hootsuite/atlantis#163
Why was it migrated?

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in server.go, it doesn't feel like it'd hurt to do things like ATLANTIS_GH_USER etc. Two use cases:

1. In k8s everything is an env var, makes parameterizing for different envs easier
2. In systemd, an envrionmentFile can be turned without a daemon-reload

[atlantisbot]

Comment by @lkysow
Monday Oct 23, 2017 at 13:51 GMT

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Hey @robertlabrie thanks for the ticket. I've got a couple thoughts/questions about this.

• I don't think just because we can have environment variables for every flag that it necessarily makes sense to do so. It makes the interface to Atlantis more complicated and so I want to be careful with that. If you look at Consul (https://www.consul.io/docs/agent/options.html) you'll see they don't offer many flags as environment variables.
• The approach we've taken until now is to only have env vars for sensitive data like the github token

So to that end, can you give us more information about your specific use case to help us understand your problem better? It sounds like you're interested in make the variables that change per environment to be set via env vars?

Also, in Kubernetes you can use env vars as args too: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/inject-data-application/define-command-argument-container/#use-environment-variables-to-define-arguments but this is a bit more kludgy.

[atlantisbot]

Comment by @robertlabrie
Monday Oct 23, 2017 at 14:11 GMT

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Hi @lkysow I didn't realize there were any downsides to it, so maybe it's no so trivial. I'm running Atlantis as a systemd service. I had to template both the .service file and an environment file for the sensitive data. Making everything an env var means I just have to template my EnvironmentFile.

Same with kubernetes. You can pass args to a container, but it's this clunky array of args so you end up with ["--gh-user","someuser"]. They seem to treat env vars as a preferred method.

In neither case is it the end of the world, it makes things a little cleaner I think but I'm not so attached to the idea that I'll fork the project and implement it myself. This just came up while I was setting it up for us.

[Unit]
Description=Atlantis

[Service]
Type=simple
User=atlantis
Group=atlantis
EnvironmentFile=/etc/atlantis
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/atlantis server --gh-hostname sqbu-github.cisco.com --gh-user someuser

[atlantisbot]

Comment by @robertlabrie
Monday Oct 23, 2017 at 17:53 GMT

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So I just had to add something, my chef template for atlantis.service looks like this:

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/atlantis server --gh-hostname <%= node['atlantis']['gh_hostname'] %> --gh-user <%= node['atlantis']['gh_user'] %> --atlantis-url <%= node['atlantis']['url'] %>

[atlantisbot]

Comment by @lkysow
Tuesday Oct 24, 2017 at 01:27 GMT

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👍 everything makes sense to me. I think we could add env vars for

• atlantis-url
• config
• data-dir
• gh-hostname
• gh-user
• log-level
• port
• require-approval

What do you think @anubhavmishra?

[atlantisbot]

Comment by @anubhavmishra
Wednesday Oct 25, 2017 at 18:06 GMT

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Let's add environment variables since it is optional anyway.

[lkysow]

@robertlabrie better late than never? Sorry this took so long!