My Issue

Hi there, I am using NextJS to build my web application and I dockerized my project, so that I can easily deploy it for my projects. I am running into an issue where my environment variables is not taken in from docker, as I understood that this is because next build actually embeds the environment variables into the codes during build time.

My Current Workaround

As part of my docker container, I had to use next dev to run my service, (instead of run start). By doing so, the environment variables will be read from my instance, and updated accordingly.

This is my docker build scripts

# Use an official Node.js runtime as a parent image
FROM node:21-alpine3.17

# Set the working directory in the container
WORKDIR /anpr-smart-frontend

# Copy package.json and package-lock.json to the working directory
COPY package*.json ./

# Install project dependencies
RUN npm install

# Install dependencies using Yarn
RUN yarn install --frozen-lockfile

# Copy the rest of the application code to the working directory
COPY . .

# Build the Next.js application
RUN npm run build

# Expose the port that the Next.js application will run on
EXPOSE 3000

# Command to start the application
CMD ["yarn", "dev"]

This is my docker compose script

  # ANPR-Dashboard    
  frontend:
    image: smart-anpr-frontend
    container_name: smart-anpr-frontend
    environment:
      - BASE_URL=http://something-new-hurray.com ### The Variable 
    ports:
      - '1001:3000'

My Question

1. I wanted to check if whether this is the only workaround, of if anyone has any better solutions out there for me to resolve this. It is actually very simple, I want my environment variables defined to be loaded in run time, so that I can flexibily deploy my applications in other sites, without any specific builds for my customers.
2. I would like to check if anyone had been using dev mode for their productions, and if there is any implications which I would need to be aware of. My services are designed to serve only no more than 10 Clients at any one time, so the load is actually not that big.

Have you ever received an answer or found a solution?