Managing Secrets — in Docker Compose A Developer's Guide

It's truly remarkable how much the direction of software engineering is dictated by inertia. Brendan Eich in 1995 designed JavaScript to be a client side scripting language of choice for the Netscape browser, over the years it has evolved to be on the client, server and other technologies like serverless. Similarly, Docker Compose has evolved from a local development tool into a popular choice for deploying applications, even in production environments. While Docker has published guidelines for using Compose in production, one critical aspect often overlooked by users is secure secret management.

In this guide, we'll explore the best practices for managing secrets in modern Docker Compose deployments and discuss common pitfalls to avoid. We'll progressively build up from basic approaches to more secure configurations.

Most Docker Compose setups handle secrets in one of two ways: either by hardcoding them directly in the compose file or using a .env file:

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