Vanilla Dockerized

A Dockerized single-node Vanilla Forums setup ready for take-off.

Requirements

Configuration

To configure the environment variables of the different containers copy .env.example to .env and adjust to your needs.

The initial Vanilla configuration is performed when first installing Vanilla after booting up the different containers. Prior to running the installation you must however copy config.example.php to config.php in the front/config/vanilla directory to include some initial configuration required for the setup to function properly.

Running

$ docker-compose up

Simple as that! Once all containers have been booted up and the database created in database/data (optionally specified in .env) you can navigate to the address of your server to continue with the Vanilla installation. You can find the database information in config.example.php; while the name, user, and password are all pre-entered on the installation page, the host is forced and has to be set manually.

Upgrading

When new versions of Vanilla are released the front container will need to be rebuilt. To rebuild the container using the new release, update the VANILLA_VERSION environment variable in front/Dockerfile and then run:

docker-compose build front
docker-compose up

Since the VANILLA_VERSION variable is used at runtime rather that build time it must be set in the Dockerfile and not .env.

Addons

Addons in the applications, locales, plugins, and themes directories will be copied to the front container when building. Follow the steps described in Upgrading when adding new addons to make sure that they're copied to the container.

Security

While most processes with the exception of memcached are run as root to circumvent permission issues, only ports 80 and 443 are publicly exposed. This means that the database and cache containers can only be accessed from within the host machine as well as linked containers but not from the outside.

Mail

The setup does not include a built-in mail server as this is better left to dedicated providers. A dedicated SMTP server is therefore required for mail in Vanilla to function properly. SendGrid has a free plan that should be suitable for smaller installations; they also provide larger plans as needed.

krjordan/vanilla-dockerized