Pass an individual environment variable to an Amazon ECS container

Important

We recommend storing your sensitive data in either AWS Secrets Manager secrets or AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store parameters. For more information, see Pass sensitive data to an Amazon ECS container.

Environment variables specified in the task definition are readable by all users and roles that are allowed the DescribeTaskDefinition action for the task definition.

You can pass environment variables to your containers in the following ways:

• Individually using the environment container definition parameter. This maps to the --env option to docker run.

• In bulk, using the environmentFiles container definition parameter to list one or more files that contain the environment variables. The file must be hosted in Amazon S3. This maps to the --env-file option to docker run.

The following is a snippet of a task definition showing how to specify individual environment variables.

{
    "family": "",
    "containerDefinitions": [
        {
            "name": "",
            "image": "",
            ...
            "environment": [
                {
                    "name": "variable",
                    "value": "value"
                }
            ],
            ...
        }
    ],
    ...
}