Why you shouldn’t use ENV variables for secret data (diogomonica.com)

[…..] with swarm it is easy, 3 cmds from above

https://docs.docker.com/get-started/07_multi_container/#run-your-app-with-mysql

A more secure mechanism is to use the secret support provided by your container orchestration framework. In most cases, these secrets are mounted as files in the running container.

You’ll see many apps (including the MySQL image and the todo app) also support env vars with a _FILE suffix to point to a file containing the variable.

As an example, setting the MYSQL_PASSWORD_FILE var will cause the app to use the contents of the referenced file as the connection password.

Docker doesn’t do anything to support these env vars. Your app will need to know to look for the variable and get the file contents.