In this post I’ll show you how you can quickly and easily setup a fast Joomla! site running in Docker, and using Memcached for caching. We’ll also be using Docker Compose to make managing the relationships between containers easier.
Docker Compose makes the task of managing multiple Docker containers (in our case, Apache, MySQL, and Memcached) much easier than doing them individually. It also makes it easier if you want to develop this site on your local environment and later push it to a remote server with docker — although that’s a topic for another tutorial.
Install Docker and Docker Compose
If you haven’t installed Docker on your machine yet, follow these instructions. Check out the docs for your environment. The instructions for Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS) are below. Be sure to run them as root! If you already have Docker skip on to installing Docker Compose if you don’t already have it.
apt-get update apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D echo "deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-trusty main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list apt-get update apt-get install linux-image-extra-$(uname -r) apparmor docker-engine service docker start
Next install docker compose:
curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.6.2/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` >> /usr/local/bin/docker-compose chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose docker-compose -v
You should see docker-compose output its version information. Something like: docker-compose version 1.6.2, build 4d72027
.
Prepare Joomla and Docker files
Next up we need to create the docker compose files and get the Joomla files ready to use:
mkdir -p ./mysite/website_source ./mysite/mysql cd mysite
Create a Dockerfile
Next create a Dockerfile
(e.g. vim Dockerfile
) that tells Docker to base your webserver code off of a PHP5 image, and include your source code.
FROM php:5-fpm # Install dependencies RUN apt-get update -y && apt-get install -y php5-json php5-xmlrpc libxml2-dev php5-common zlib1g-dev libmemcached-dev # Install mysqli extension RUN docker-php-ext-install mysqli # Install memcache extension RUN pecl install memcache && docker-php-ext-enable memcache # Add sources to image ADD ./website_source /site
Create the Docker Compose config file
And then create the docker-compose.yml
file (e.g. vim docker-compose.yml
). The docker-compose file lays out how your website is structured. It says that your site is composed of three services: web
which is an Apache/PHP image with your source code baked in, db
which is the MySQL database, and cache
which is the memcached image. It also tells docker how to connect these docker containers so that they can communicate with each other. Lastly, it tells docker to bind port 80 to the web
container. Lastly, the mysql container will mount the mysql
directory on the host and place the database files there. This way if the container is removed or anything you don’t lose your database.
version: '2' services: web: build: . command: php -S 0.0.0.0:80 -t /site ports: - "80:80" depends_on: - db - cache volumes: - ./website_source:/site db: image: orchardup/mysql environment: MYSQL_DATABASE: joomla MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: my_secret_pass volumes: - ./mysql:/var/lib/mysql cache: image: memcached
By sure to replace my_secret_pass
with a secure password for the mysql user!
Get Joomla! Sources
Now that you have a Dockerfile
and docker-compose.yml
you just need to get the sources for Joomla and install them:
wget https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/3.4.8/Joomla_3.4.8-Stable-Full_Package.zip unzip Joomla*.zip -d ./website_source mv ./website_source/htaccess.txt ./website_source/.htaccess mv ./website_source/robots.txt.dist ./website_source/robots.txt
Note that if you don’t have unzip
installed you can install it by running apt-get install unzip
.
Build and Run Docker Containers
Now that you have everything setup its time to test everything by building and running the docker containers. This is accomplished with docker-compose
:
docker-compose build docker-compose up
This will run the whole application in the foreground of your terminal. Go to http://localhost:80
and complete the Joomla Installer! You’ll use the mysql username and password you specified in your docker-compose.yml file. The mysql host is also specified in the docker-compose.yml
file as the name of the database service. In our case, this is db
. Once you’re finished you can use CTRL+C
to stop the containers.
Configuring Joomla for Memcached
Now that your Joomla site is running under docker it’s time to connect it to the memcached server to make sure that things stay speedy!
To enable memcached edit website_sources/configuration.php
and replace
public $caching = '0'; public $cache_handler = 'file';
with this:
public $caching = '2'; public $cache_handler = 'memcache'; public $memcache_server_host = 'cache'; public $memcache_server_port = '11211'
Add your changes to the container image with docker-compose build
and then run docker-compose up
, log into the Joomla administration page and go to “Global Configuration” -> “System”. You can tweak the settings under “Cache Settings” or leave them as they are.
Running on Server Start
The last step in setting up a web application with docker is to have the web server started when the server starts.
Create the file /etc/init/mydockersite.conf
with the contents:
description "Website Docker Compose" author "MichaelBlouin" start on filesystem and started docker stop on runlevel [!2345] respawn script /usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /var/www/mysite/docker-compose.yml up end script
Be sure to replace /var/www/mysite/docker-compose.yml
with the full path to your docker-compose.yml
!
Save the file and run the following to register the service, and to start it:
initctl reload-configuration service mydockersite start
And there you go! You can view logs for your service by running docker-compose logs
while in the same directory as your docker-compose.yml
or by reading the logfile at /var/log/upstart/mydockersite.log
.
Congrats, you now have a speedy Joomla! install running in Docker! If you liked this tutorial consider following @michaelblouin on Twitter!
In order to get your application running on start up, you can use “restart: always” in docker-compose.yml
Thanks for the tip! I wasn’t aware of that
Lovely! Thanks for neat and working instructions to setup a joomla installation with memcached and all that jazz. took a couple minutes and worked! unlike other manuals on the interwebz
I’m glad it helped! That’s the magic of Docker – it should always work the same wherever you run it if done correctly!
Hi Michael,
It works perfectly!
Any suggestion how to add letsencrypt certificate in order to use Joomla via HTTPS?
Thanks in advance…
Hey Giancarlo,
I’m working on this problem myself. If you only have a single docker machine (all containers on the same physical machine) then I think the steps are as follows:
1. Create an image that runs a foreground version of cron
2. Add letsencrypt to that image and configure it to renew certs daily using cron config
3. Create a folder that contains the SSL certs in /certs/domain/ssl
4. Create a folder for ACME challenges in /certs/domain/acme
5. Mount the SSL and acme folders for the domain in the Joomla container so that the acme folder is served when .well-known is requested from the domain
6. Do the initial cert request in the letsencrypt container
7. Configure Joomla to use that cert.
I am working on a blog post that would provide examples of this, although it’s also going to solve the issue of doing this on a Docker Swarm cluster with many instances of the web server so it’s a tad more complicated. Stay tuned!