What is the "Correct" way to set values in alfresco-global.properties with docker-compose?

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mangar

I am using the Alfresco SDK,  and everything seems to be working fine.  I now need to move my stack from dev to test.  So all of my hard coded values in the alfresco-platform-docker/src/main/docker/alfresco-global.properties need to change.  

I know I could just write a script that switches out files before deploying,  but I know that's not "right"

I want to be able to set these as environment variables that get injected at deploy time.  

Any way to do this?

*******  Update

I found that adding properties under different profiles in the pom works fine, just build with the right profile and done.  But again,  I am asking for what alfresco considers the "correct" way

abhinavmishra14

In my opinion the better way is to use "JAVA_OPTS" (JVM runtime parameters) to set environment specific properties. 

Building artificats per environment defeats the purpose of "build once and deploy everywhere" approach.

Even alfresco's base image has empty alfresco-global.properties and all properties are set via JVM params. See the example here: https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-deployment/blob/master/docker-compose/community-docker-compose.yml#L26

For example setting db properties per environment:

Dev:
JAVA_OPTS: "
   -Ddb.username=alfresco_dev
   -Ddb.password=alfresco_Dev
   -Ddb.url=jdbc:postgresql://dev.alfresco.db:5432/alfresco          
   "

QA:

JAVA_OPTS: "-Ddb.username=alfresco_qa 
  -Ddb.password=alfresco_qa
  -Ddb.url=jdbc:postgresql://qa.alfresco.db:5432/alfresco 
"

The above example requires you to have environemt specific docker-compose.yml file. On the same lines there is another better way, you would have one docker-compose.yml but you can use 'environment-file (--env-file)' with docker-compose to pass the environment specific variable file. 

For example:

.env

DB_USERNAME=alfresco 
DB_PASS=alfresco
DB_URL=jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/alfresco

.env.dev

DB_USERNAME=alfresco_dev
DB_PASS=alfresco_dev
DB_URL=jdbc:postgresql://dev.alfresco.db:5432/alfresco

.env.qa

DB_USERNAME=alfresco_qa
DB_PASS=alfresco_qa
DB_URL=jdbc:postgresql://qa.alfresco.db:5432/alfresco

In your standard docker-compose.yml:

JAVA_OPTS: "
     -Ddb.username=${DB_USERNAME}
     -Ddb.password=${DB_PASS}
     -Ddb.url=${DB_URL}
   "

When starting the containers you would use following like command:

To Start local containers:

docker-compose --env-file .env up

or (When --env-file param is not passed, docker-compose by default looks for a .env file if available)

docker-compose up

To Start Dev containers:
 
docker-compose --env-file .env.dev up

To Start QA containers:
 
docker-compose --env-file .env.qa up

Ofcourse you can manage these environment files as per your org standards. 

Checkout this repository as well: https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-deployment