Using environment variable files for SQL Server in containers

There are a whole bunch of environment variables that can be used to configure SQL Server when run in a Docker container. You can check out the full list here.

So we could end up with a docker container run statement like this: –

docker container run -d `
--publish 15789:1433 `
--env MSSQL_PID=Developer `
--env MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=Testing1122 `
--env ACCEPT_EULA=Y `
--env MSSQL_AGENT_ENABLED=True `
--env MSSQL_DATA_DIR=/var/opt/sqlserver/sqldata `
--env MSSQL_LOG_DIR=/var/opt/sqlserver/sqllog `
--env MSSQL_BACKUP_DIR=/var/opt/sqlserver/sqlbackups `
--name sqlcontainer1 `
mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2019-CU12-ubuntu-18.04

Do we really want to be typing all that out every time we run a container? Ok, we could drop this into a script and execute that but another option is to use environment variable files.

Nice and simple, we take all the environment variables in the statement above and drop them into a file on our Docker host: –

MSSQL_PID=Developer
ACCEPT_EULA=Y
MSSQL_AGENT_ENABLED=True
MSSQL_DATA_DIR=/var/opt/sqlserver/sqldata
MSSQL_LOG_DIR=/var/opt/sqlserver/sqllog
MSSQL_BACKUP_DIR=/var/opt/sqlserver/sqlbackups

And now just reference that file in the docker container run statement (I saved my file as C:Tempvar.env): –

docker container run -d `
--publish 15789:1433 `
--env MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD=Testing1122 `
--env-file C:tempvar.env `
--name sqlcontainer1 `
mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2019-CU12-ubuntu-18.04

To confirm the variables have been set: –

docker exec sqlcontainer1 printenv

And there they are! We can also use multiple files referenced using the –env-file flag.

Another way of doing is (probably better?) is to use Docker Compose. If you want to learn more about compose, check out the SQL Server & Containers Guide!

Thanks for reading!