[FLINK-1427] Configuration through environment variables

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Component/s: Runtime / Task
• Labels: configuration deployment

Environment

Deployment

• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Maximilian Michels
• Created: 21/Jan/15 15:05
• Updated: 19/Apr/16 11:54
• Resolved: 19/Apr/16 11:54

Description

Like Hadoop or Spark, etc. Flink should support configuration via shell environment variables. In cluster setups, this makes things a lot easier because writing config files can be omitted. Many automation tools (e.g. Google's bdutil) use (or abuse) this feature.

For example, to set up the task manager heap size, we would run `export FLINK_TASKMANAGER_HEAP=4096` before starting the task manager on a node to set the heap memory size to 4096MB.

Environment variables should overwrite the regular config entries.