Docker for Invoice Ninja

💡 Please consider posting your question on StackOverflow as this widens the audience that can help you. Just use the tag invoice-ninja and we are there to help. This is mostly related to the usage of Invoice Ninja and the docker setup. If you feel your question is directly related to a code change or you want to sent in a change + PR Github is the right place, of course.

👑 Features

🔒 Automatic HTTPS (❤️ Caddy)
🔨 Fully production-ready through docker-compose
📝 Adjustable to your needs via environment variable

Prerequisites

Generate an application key

Before starting Invoice Ninja via Docker make sure you generate a valid application key. If you are not sure what an application key is, please visit this blog post.

To generate an application key just run

docker run --rm -it invoiceninja/invoiceninja php artisan key:generate --show

This will generate an application key for you which you need later.

Create folders for data persistence

To make your data persistent, you have to mount public and storage from your host to your containers.

Create two folder on your host, e. g. /var/invoiceninja/public and /var/invoiceninja/storage
Mount these folders into your container - see usage

You can create these folders wherever you want on your host system.

⚠️ When using host mounted folder for persistence, make sure they are owned by the proper user and group. As we run Invoice Ninja without root , we use a separate user, the folders on the host system need to be owned by uid 1000 and a gid 101.

Run this on your host system

chown -R 1000:101 /var/invoiceninja/public /var/invoiceninja/storage

to apply the proper permission to the folders. This also applies to the docker-compose setup when using bind-mounted host directories.

PhantomJS key

The PhantomJS key is set to a-demo-key-with-low-quota-per-ip-address. This demo key is limited to 100 requests per day.

To set a different key feel free to add -e PHANTOMJS_CLOUD_KEY='<INSERT YOUR PHANTOMJS KEY HERE>' to thee docker command below.

For further configuration and toubleshotting regarding PhantomJS and Invoice Ninja see documentation here.

Usage

⚠️ The latest tag contains the new version 5 of Invoice Ninja which is still in alpha state. To stick to the version 4 please use alpine-4 tag.

To run it:

docker run -d \
  -v /var/invoiceninja/public:/var/app/public \
  -v /var/invoiceninja/storage:/var/app/storage \
  -e APP_URL='http://ninja.dev' \
  -e APP_KEY='<INSERT THE GENERATED APPLICATION KEY HERE>' \
  -e DB_HOST='localhost' \
  -e DB_DATABASE='ninja' \
  -e DB_USERNAME='ninja' \
  -e DB_PASSWORD='ninja' \
  -p '9000:9000' \
  --name invoiceninja \
  invoiceninja/invoiceninja:alpine-4

A list of environment variables can be found here.

With docker-compose

Running Invoice Ninja with docker-compose gives you everything to quickly start. Before starting please make sure you configured your setup correctly. You can do so by opening the docker-compose.yml and may change the follwing items.

⚠️ The docker-compose.yml runs the new version 5 of Invoice Ninja which is still in alpha state. To stick to the version 4 please use alpine-4 tag.

Port

default: 80

This is the port where your Invoice Ninja is reachable, when you type in http://<your-domain.com>. If it should be different than 80 make sure to call your installation http://<your-domain.com>:<YOUR-PORT>, e. g. http://<your-domain.com>:8080.

ports: 
  - "8080:80" # To run it on port 8080

⚠️ Make sure the port set is available and not occupied by another service on your host system.

URL and application key

default: https://localhost

For generating a proper application key see generate an application key. Change the value where your Invoice Ninja installation should be reachable.

environment: 
  - APP_URL=http://localhost

MYSQL root password

default: ninjaAdm1nPassword

The mysql database server comes with two users: one for accessing the Invoice Ninja database and the root user. Please change the default password for root to something more special 😉

Volumes and directories

default: volumes

This is the place where your uploaded files are stored. Normally this is a so called volume which can be reused by different docker containers. One might prefer to store the files directly on the host system - for this the config section is prepared with what is called bind-mounted host directory. Just adjust the paths and Invoice Ninja stores the user files on the host system.

volumes:
  ...
  # Configure your mounted directories, make sure the folder 'public' and 'storage'
  # exist, before mounting them
  #-  public:/var/www/app/public
  #-  storage:/var/www/app/storage
  # you may use a bind-mounted host directory instead, so that it is harder to accidentally remove the volume and lose all your data!
  - ./docker/app/public:/var/www/app/public:rw,delegated
  - ./docker/app/storage:/var/www/app/storage:rw,delegated

The sample above stores the files on the post at ./docker/app/public and ./docker/app/storage.

⚠️ If using bind-mounted host directories make sure they exists and have proper rights. See here for details.

Docker secrets

ℹ️ This feature is borrowed from mariadb docker image.

As an alternative to passing sensitive information via environment variables, _FILE may be appended to the below listed environment variables, causing the initialization script to load the values for those variables from files present in the container. In particular, this can be used to load passwords from Docker secrets stored in /run/secrets/<secret_name> files.

Supported are these variables:
APP_KEY, API_SECRET, CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY, DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD, MAIL_USERNAME, MAIL_PASSWORD, MAILGUN_SECRET, S3_KEY, S3_SECRET

Debugging your Docker setup

Even when running your Invoice Ninja setup with Docker - errors can occur. Depending on where the error happens - the webserver, Invoice Ninja or the database - different log files can be responsible.

Show logs without `docker-compose`

If you are not running docker-compose you first need to find the container id for your php container with docker ps. Then you can run

docker logs -f <CONTAINER NAME>

This gives you a constant output of the log files for the php container.

Show logs with `docker-compose`

If you are running the docker-compose setup you can output all logs, from all containers, with the following command

docker-compose logs -f

If you better want a physical log file in in your storage/logs folder, just add -e LOG=single to the usage command. Or add an environment variable

...
environment:
  LOG: single
...

to your docker-compose.yml.

This generated log file will only hold Invoice Ninja information.

iamcpdev/dockerfiles