Accessing environment variables when running shiny server in Kubernetes (Docker)

[markusdumke]

Split from Different ways to start a shiny app inside docker? - #4

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I have a PostgreSQL database running which I want to access. It is stated that

By default, users are only allowed to login locally if the system username matches the PostgreSQL username.

So I created a user shiny in postgres. But I still see this error in the shiny-server logs:

Error in connection_create(names(opts), as.vector(opts)) :
  could not connect to server: No such file or directory
        Is the server running locally and accepting
        connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
Calls: runApp ... <Anonymous> -> <Anonymous> -> .local -> connection_create
Execution halted

When running R as user root it works though. Any idea what is wrong?

[markusdumke]

Ok, I found the problem: The environment variables are empty for the user shiny.

I am creating the connection with

pool <- dbPool(RPostgres::Postgres(),
               host = Sys.getenv("DB_HOST"),
               user = Sys.getenv("DB_USER"),
               password = Sys.getenv("DB_PASSWORD"), 
               port = 5432,
               dbname = "postgres")

For the user root these variables are correctly resolved, but for the user shiny these are empty. I am setting the environment variables via the deployment.yaml file in Kubernetes.

How can I make sure that shiny-server can access these environment variables?