Passing environment variables to `docker-compose` when using ecs context

Question

I am trying to use the new ecs context that the latest docker cli exposes. When I create the context using docker context create ecs my_context, I select the use environment variables method (the recommended way), how now matter how I try to call docker compose, it always returns the message context requires credentials to be passed as environment variables. Searching for this message in google returns nothing :/

I have tried passing using the -e and --environment flags, I have tried with a .env file, and the --env-file flag.

docker --context my_ecs compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XXXXXXX -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XXXXXXXX -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=XXXXXXXX up

If I don't use the environment variable method, it hits another known (frustrating) bug, whereby it uses the wrong aws region, even though the context is setup with the correct region. I feel the environment variable option would resolve that, if I could get it to see the environment variables.

Answer 1

Google search lead me to this post, (I am not using Windows but aws cloud9 IDE,) I could get rid of the message context requires credentials to be passed as environment variables by passing dummy values to the environment vars, it goes like this.

$ docker context create ecs myecscontext 
? Create a Docker context using: AWS environment variables
Successfully created ecs context "myecscontext"
$ docker context use myecscontext                                                                    
myecscontext
$ docker context ls
context requires credentials to be passed as environment variables
$ AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=dummy AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=dummy AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=dummy docker context ls     
NAME                TYPE                DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT               KUBERNETES ENDPOINT   ORCHESTRATOR
default             moby                Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   unix:///var/run/docker.sock                         swarm
myecscontext *      ecs                 credentials read from environment                                                             
$ AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=dummy AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=dummy AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=dummy docker context use default
default
$ docker context ls
NAME                TYPE                DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT               KUBERNETES ENDPOINT   ORCHESTRATOR
default *           moby                Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   unix:///var/run/docker.sock                         swarm
myecscontext        ecs                 credentials read from environment                                                             
$ docker context rm myecscontext
myecscontext