title: Passing environment variables to Docker containers
body: <p>Currently using Elastic Beanstalk to run Docker containers, I need to pass important information as environment variables to my containers.</p>
  
  <p>My current Dockerrun.aws.json looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
      "AWSEBDockerrunVersion": "1",
      "Image": {
          "Name": "b2boost/rabbitelasticdockstash",
          "Update": "true"
      },
      "Ports": [
          {
              "ContainerPort": "80"
          }
      ],
      "environment": [
          {
              "name": "RABBITMQ_HOST",
              "value": "RABBITMQ_HOST"
          },
          {
              "name": "RABBITMQ_PASSWORD",
              "value": "RABBITMQ_PASSWORD"
          },
          {
              "name": "RABBITMQ_USER",
              "value": "RABBITMQ_USER"
          },
          {
              "name": "RABBITMQ_VHOST",
              "value": "RABBITMQ_VHOST"
          },
          {
              "name": "ELASTICSEARCH_HOST",
              "value": "ELASTICSEARCH_HOST"
          },
          {
              "name": "ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD",
              "value": "ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD"
          },
          {
              "name": "ELASTICSEARCH_PORT",
              "value": "ELASTICSEARCH_PORT"
          },
          {
              "name": "ELASTICSEARCH_PROTOCOL",
              "value": "ELASTICSEARCH_PROTOCOL"
          },
          {
              "name": "ELASTICSEARCH_USER",
              "value": "ELASTICSEARCH_USER"
          }
      ],
      "Volumes": [
      ],
      "Logging": "/var/log/eb-activity.log"
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This doesn't work however. When SSHing to my beanstalk instance then getting the content of the environment variables, I can see that they weren't initialized:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[ec2-user@myip ~]$ sudo docker exec goofy_curie env
  
  PATH=/opt/logstash/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:bin
  HOSTNAME=HOSTNAME
  LANG=C.UTF-8
  JAVA_VERSION=7u79
  JAVA_DEBIAN_VERSION=7u79-2.5.5-1~deb8u1
  LOGSTASH_MAJOR=1.5
  LOGSTASH_VERSION=1:1.5.1-1
  HOME=/root
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I set the environment variables in my containers? The Dockerrun.aws.json doesn't seem to work for me.</p>