Hey everyone got a question. I am currently working on building a flow via the

Docker

storage class. Right now my flow imports env vars from a

config.py

, found in the same directory with the file that holds my flow, which uses

os.environ

. I would like to set those environment variables at run time but when, the healtchecks run and deserialize my flow in the docker build step, it is trying to evaluate those environment variables. This causes an error since I don't have defaults set. Does anyone have any ideas of have to handle this without ignoring healthchecks and putting environment variables into the Dockerfile that gets generated?

Hi @Geoffrey Gross! Are those environment variables secrets? If so you might try using the Secrets feature instead: https://docs.prefect.io/core/concepts/secrets.html#overview

Some of them are. But I guess, I like to not hard code them into the Dockerfile even if they aren't secrets. I like having python throw an error when it can't find an environment variable where a default variable wouldn't be acceptable in different environments (local, dev, stage, prod). I am already reading in secrets that way. I guess I could move more env vars into a Secret object.

That definitely makes sense to me

Okay. Thanks!

But I’ll also add that there are a couple of different ways to get configuration into your Prefect flow

I'll check this out.

Although that configuration link is probably not what you’re looking for, my apologies edit: it is in conjunction to the other article, so 👍

I should also mention that some of my env vars are used to set defaults for Parameters. I guess if there was/is a way to have Parameters read default values from the environment that could solve my issue.