How to set environment in a remote pipeline

How Do I?
1

With a “regular” okteto deploy we can control the pipeline through environment variables. This can be done as far as I know by either running:

ENV_VAR=xxx okteto deploy

or by running:

okteto deploy -v ENV_VAR=xxx

However when we specify an image in the deploy section, and therefore run a remote pipeline, the environment variables do not seem to be propagated to the remote environment. Therefore I am not able to control the flow of the remote pipeline through environment variables.

Thus when the deploy section looks as following:

deploy:
  image: IMAGE
  commands:
    - echo $TEST_VAR

And then run:

okteto deploy -v TEST_VAR=test-value

then the value of TEST_VAR in the remote pipeline will not be set.

How can I pass environment variables to a remote pipeline?

2

Hi @florisie

I’ve been able to make it work with the last option you mentioned in okteto CLI 2.16.4 and 2.17.0

# okteto.yml
deploy:
  image: busybox
  commands:
    - echo $TEST_VAR

$ okteto deploy -v TEST_VAR=test-value 
 i  Using endpoints-test @ okteto.agustin.dev.okteto.net as context
 i  Build section is not defined in your okteto manifest
 i  Running stage 'echo $TEST_VAR'
Executing command 'echo $TEST_VAR'...
test-value
Command 'echo $TEST_VAR' successfully executed

Note that ENV_VAR=xxx okteto deploy is not working for me either.

3

I have no idea what I did wrong before. I mean, I believe I have tried exactly those ways as described in my question (and thus also the way as you describe in your answer) but I could not get it to work at the time when I wrote this question. Now I try it again to verify that indeed it does not work for me (without updating, I’m still on okteto cli 2.16.2) but now suddenly it works.

Again, no idea what I was doing wrong/different at the time that I wrote this question but I’m happy to learn that it actually does work, even on a previous version of okteto cli.

Thank you for taking the time to test it and showing me that it actually just works!

4

Your welcome!

Here’s the docs to the usage of the -v command (or --var) Okteto CLI | Okteto Documentation

In case you think there’s something to add, you can propose a PR to GitHub - okteto/docs