Howdy @DaveVH! And welcome to RStudio Community!!
You do get different strings - and that is normal because we add a salt/hash. Otherwise it is possible to "brute force" a value by guessing and comparing hashes
This is pretty standard in encryption-land, but can make "checking / validating a value" challenging.
If that is what you are looking for, there is unfortunately no answer today, although I will provide feedback to the product engineers that a way to "check a value" would be valuable. Especially because idempotency often requires such things.
Doing this workflow in a docker container is challenging because of the idempotency restriction I mentioned above. However, we have seen users accomplish this task by using an entrypoint script, an "init container" / container that runs before other things, etc.
If chatting through options would be helpful, we are happy to do so either here, in our support queue, or through your account representative! 