Substitute environment variables in NGINX config from docker-compose

You can avoid some of the hassles with Compose interpreting environment variables by defining your own entrypoint. See this simple example:

• entrypoint.sh (make sure this file is executable)

#!/bin/sh

export NGINXPROXY

envsubst '${NGINXPROXY}' < /config.template > /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

exec "$@"

• docker-compose.yml

version: "3.7"

services:
    front-end:
        image: nginx
        environment:
            - NGINXPROXY=172.31.67.100:9300
        ports:
            - 80:80
        volumes:
            - ./config:/config.template
            - ./entrypoint.sh:/entrypoint.sh
        entrypoint: ["/entrypoint.sh"]
        command: ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]

My config file has the same content as your nginx.conf, aside from the fact that I had to comment the lines using the Perl module.

Note that I had to mount my config file to another location before I could envsubst it. I encountered some strange behaviour in the form that the file ends up empty after the substitution, which can be avoided by this approach. It shouldn't be a problem in your specific case, because you already embed it in your image on build time.

---

EDIT

For completeness, to change your setup as little as possible, you just have to make sure that you export your environment variable. Adapt your command like this:

command: ["/bin/bash", "-c", "export NGINXPROXY && envsubst '$$NGINXPROXY' < /etc/nginx/nginx.conf > /etc/nginx/nginx.conf && nginx -g 'daemon off;'"]

...and you should be good to go. I would always recommend the "cleaner" way with defining your own entrypoint, though.

Since nginx 1.19 you can now use environment variables in your configuration with docker-compose. I used the following setup:

# file: docker/nginx/templates/default.conf.conf
upstream api-upstream {
    server ${API_HOST};
}


# file: docker-compose.yml
services:
    nginx:
        image: nginx:1.19-alpine
        volumes:
            - "./docker/nginx/templates:/etc/nginx/templates/"
        environment:
            NGINX_ENVSUBST_TEMPLATE_SUFFIX: ".conf"
            API_HOST: api.example.com
        

I'm going off script a little from the example in the documentation. Note the extra .conf extension on the template file - this is not a typo. In the docs for the nginx image it is suggested to name the file, for example, default.conf.template. Upon startup, a script will take that file, substitute the environment variables, and then output the file to /etc/nginx/conf.d/ with the original file name, dropping the .template suffix.

By default that suffix is .template, but this breaks syntax highlighting unless you configure your editor. Instead, I specified .conf as the template suffix. If you only name your file default.conf the result will be a file named /etc/nginx/conf.d/default and your site won't be served as expected.