Using Infisical for Docker Composer Secrets

tankerkiller125

After running into Infisical by chance, I was really interested in using it for Docker secrets (because I don't like dealing with Hashicorp vault) and I found their documentation kind of lacking for docker compose in particular because they basically assume that your a developer building a docker image (instead of a pre-built one). With this guide I want to point out another way to use it.

For this guide I'm using self-hosted Infisical, and Ubuntu Server with the latest version of Docker and compose v2.

Installing Infisical Docker Compose

Infisical has some very good documentation for doing this in their docker compose self-hosted docs so I won't repeat them here. Just know that you either need to do this, or use the cloud hosted version for anything else.

Install Infisical CLI

For Ubuntu you can run the following commands:

curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/infisical/infisical-cli/setup.deb.sh' | sudo -E bash

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y infisical

For other linux distros you can use the commands in their docs.

Using with docker compose

For use with docker compose you would create docker compose file like:

version: "3.7"
services:
  test:
    environment:
      - MY_VAR=${INFCAL_MY_VAR}
    image: alpine:latest
    entrypoint:
      - printenv

In Infiscal you would configure environment variable to be INFCAL_MY_VAR with whatever value you want. From here you then would get the service token for use and then run the following commands:

export INFISICAL_TOKEN=*****

# Only if your self-hosting Infrisical
export INFISICAL_API_URL=https://yourdomain.com/api

docker compose --env-file <(infisical export --format=dotenv) up

Once you run the docker compose command, you should see the console output of the alpine image and it should display the environment variables in which MY_VAR should be displayed with the contents you set in Infisical.

Known Issues

The only known issue I have found so far is that you can't use "multi-line" environment variables. Otherwise everything seems to work exactly as it's supposed to.

katos

Definitely need to give this a try!
Thanks for the guidance tankerkiller125