environmental variables in bosh deployment

Question

I would like for a job J from a release R in a bosh deployment to start with a certain environmental variable E set, which is not available in the job's properties for configuration

Can this be specified in the deployment file or when calling the bosh cli?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I am pretty sure this is not possible. BOSH does not understand environment variables. Instead, it executes an ERB template with the properties configured in the manifest. For example in this job template from log-cache is executed with the properties from a manifest along with defaults from the job spec.

If you need to have a particular environment variable set for testing/development, you can bosh ssh on to an instance where you are going to run the job and then mutate the generated file. Given the CF deployment example, bosh ssh doppler/0 and then modify the generated bpm.yml in /var/vcap/jobs/log-cache/config/bpm.yml. This is a workaround for debugging and development, if you need to set a field in a manifest reach out to the release author and open an issue or PR the ability to set environment variable as a property by adding it to the job spec.

(note the versions used in the example are just from HEAD and may not actually work)