Deploying a Dockerised go server to AWS Elasticbeanstalk/Ec2 instance via GitHub Actions environment variable issue

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My deployment stack looks like this:

Go project that has a Dockerfile and config.yml for GitHub automation.
Simple AWS setup where I build to ECR and deploy to my EC2 instance via Elastic Beanstalk
All my AWS credentials are stored in Github Secrets.
Previously the rest of the required env variables were stored in config.env in the Go project.
All the above automation works just fine.

For better security, easier modification with branches, etc I want to move all the information out of the config.env file into the Secrets and Variables of the GitHub Action.

Unfortunately, these are not parsing through to the env variables of the Docker container as expected. I tried for a few hours last night and have got to a point where I am stumped and its just not making sense.

So this is not the complete set of variables, but it is enough to show where I am stumped.

First Step - .elasticbeanstalk\deploy.yml for GitHub
For testing purposes I have set one env manually and one from GitHub variables (I get the same result with secrets.xxx too).

${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }} etc work as expected

Both the echo’s in the run block show up in the GitHub Action logs just fine as expected. So it tells me I am pulling the Variables/Secrets just fine at this point. Both --build-arg seem to work as expected too as you will see in the next part.

name: Build and Push to ECR

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main 

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      DB_USER: ${{ vars.DB_USER }}
      DB_NAME: tickerdb

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Login to Amazon ECR
        id: login-ecr
        uses: aws-actions/amazon-ecr-login@v1
        env:
          AWS_REGION: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

      - name: Build, tag, and push image to Amazon ECR
        env:
          ECR_REGISTRY: ${{ steps.login-ecr.outputs.registry }}
          ECR_REPOSITORY: tickertime-backend-app
          IMAGE_TAG: latest
        run: |
          echo "DB_USER from actions: $DB_USER"
          echo "DB_NAME from actions: $DB_NAME"
          docker build --build-arg DB_USER=$DB_USER --build-arg DB_NAME=$DB_NAME -t $ECR_REGISTRY/$ECR_REPOSITORY:$IMAGE_TAG .
          docker push $ECR_REGISTRY/$ECR_REPOSITORY:$IMAGE_TAG

Second Step - Dockerfile for building the container Once again I set one of the ARG and one of the ENV manually to test.
All three echos also show up correctly in the GitHub Action logs telling me that the ARG of DB_USER is being passed in correctly at this point.

FROM golang:1.19.1

WORKDIR /app

COPY go.mod go.sum ./

# Set arguments for the build
ARG DB_USER
ARG DB_NAME
ARG DB_PORT=5454

# Set the environment variable
ENV DB_HOST=mydb.hostname.ap-southeast-2.rds.amazonaws.com
ENV DB_PORT=$DB_PORT
ENV DB_NAME=$DB_NAME
ENV DB_USER=$DB_USER

RUN echo "DB_HOST from dockerfile: $DB_HOST"
RUN echo "DB_PORT from dockerfile: $DB_PORT"
RUN echo "DB_USER from dockerfile: $DB_USER"
RUN echo "DB_NAME from dockerfile: $DB_NAME"

RUN go mod download

COPY . .

RUN go build -o main .

EXPOSE 8080

CMD ["./main"]

Last Step - Inside the Docker container BUT when I check the env variables of my Docker container the manual persists, but not the one that has been passed in from the start (DB_HOST).

func main() {
    log.Println("DB_HOST:", os.Getenv("DB_HOST"))
    log.Println("DB_PORT:", os.Getenv("DB_PORT"))
    log.Println("DB_NAME:", os.Getenv("DB_NAME"))
    log.Println("DB_USER:", os.Getenv("DB_USER"))

All of them come through fine except DB_USER. At this point, I am stumped and have yet to find anything online that helps.

Any help would be much appreciated :slight_smile: