Strangeness with MONGO_URL SSL on K8S/Docker

[mbrinkman]

I am seeing strange behavior strange behavior where a MONGO_URL with the ssl=true parameter is not working in a docker container with the MONGO_URL being passed in as an environment variable.

Meteor 1.8 application being built and packaged as a pure Node.js app (Node.js 8.11). When run on an node application server with MONGO_URL passed in as an environment variable, the system works as expected. When run as a docker container under kubernetes with MONGO_URL passed in as an environment variable, Meteor seems to be ignoring the ssl=true parameter on the MONGO_URL.

If I add code to force the ssl encryption…

Mongo.setConnectionOptions({
ssl: true,
sslValidate: false
});

then the container version works as desired.

Does anyone have any insight into what may be going on?

[znewsham]

What’s the exact connection string you’re specifying? Is it possible you need to escape an ampersand?

[mbrinkman]

I wrote a quick sample app that demonstrates the issue. Inside its Meteor.startup method, I have

  console.log(process.env.MONGO_URL);

when this runs I see the following (as a single line) in the log

mongodb://USER:PASSWORD@mongo1:27017,mongo2:27017,mongo3:27017/DB?replicaSet=RS&readPreference=primaryPreferred&w=majority&autoReconnect=true&ssl=true

At that point we are past all shell manipulation, etc.

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Kept digging… Leaving this here just in case anyone else runs into a similar wall in the future.

There is some difference between how k8s pulls in env variables using envFrom.secretRef and from env with a secretKeyRef value. Even though everything looks good.

Not sure what the difference is, but switching to the latter made everything work.