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Access private runner host environment variables

clockworknet

Hi,

We are utilising self hosted runners, with a runner located in each of our environments (dev, staging, prod, etc). Each of the runner hosts is built with a handful of global environment variables configured, that provide some general configuration for the environment in question (e.g. AWS_DEFAULT_REGION, ENVIRONMENT_NAME, etc).

Is there a way to pass these variables into the container used to run a step on those runners, the use case being that steps would inherit configuration, simply by virtue of the runner they are assigned to? (Similar to setting and using environment variables on individual Jenkins nodes) I would rather avoid having to duplicate this configuration inside BitBucket or having to maintain functionality inside the container to pull this info in from another source, if possible.

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Theodora Boudale

Hi @clockworknet and welcome to the community.

In order to provide isolation and reproducibility, a runner doesn’t provide access directly to the host file system, so I'm afraid that what you're asking is not possible.

You can either set these variables in Bitbucket or pass the values in a file and then source the file during the build.

Kind regards,
Theodora

clockworknet

Hi Theodora,

I am suspecting that what I am asking about is not possible, but to be clear I am not asking for filesystem access. I am asking whether it is possible to pass environment variables that are set in the runner host globally, into the container started for each build step - the equivalent of:

`docker run -e SOME_GLOBAL_ENV_VAR ...`

Theodora Boudale

Hi @clockworknet,

Thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize that you were talking about passing the environment variables in the 'docker run' command for the runner.

Please allow me to check with my team internally and I'll get back to you on that.

Kind regards,
Theodora

clockworknet

Hi Theodora,

Thanks for looking into this further.

It is not the runner container that I am concerned about getting the environment variables into. I start that container and so have full control over the options that are used to start it.

It is each container that is started by the runner process, to handle a deployment step. I guess that if it were possible, those variables would need to be first passed into the runner container, but I am interested in whether it is possible to then get that process to pass them on to each container it starts.

Andrew Gibbs_431pe3

I would likewise love to be able to get an environment variable from the outer orchestrator container to the inner step container so I could make use of IAM Role derived credentials within my pipelines instead of having to use static credentials from an IAM User...

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-questions/use-IAM-role-credentials-from-private-runner-executing-inside/qaq-p/1934915