How do you troubleshoot secrets?

General Discussions General
1

I’m trying to set up a couple of containers using compose with secrets.

For the most part it seems to be working. But I have one specific case where I store secret with password for smtp in txt file. When I try to pass it via secrets system it does not work… But when I copy the password and pass it in the compose file directly it passes.

Which leads me to believe I do not understand something or I’m doing something wrong. How do you troubleshoot such cases? How do you check what’s actually being passed through?

2

Docker secrets are mounted as files in containers (doc), it requires Docker Swarm.

You can try to use a shell inside the container and cat the file to see the content.
docker exec -it <c-id> sh

3

ok, so I see the file is being mounted (no Swarm, I use it via docker compose). But how do you actually make use of it inside compose file? So for example how do I use contents of /run/secrets/db_password to actually pass a password for a service running in the container (MySQL for example)?

4

Usually the containers have special env variables, like ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE, check the docs.