Deploying Known on a docker stack

To migrate my php applications that did not have a handy docker-compose available, I needed a vanilla setup for my stack-based docker environment. Known is one of those apps and so the first step was to build that PHP environment.

Setting up a Dockerhub repository and building a custom PHP image

[If you decide to use my image, you would not have to build this yourself. Skip ahead to the Deploying Known section]

Most php based apps also need specific extensions built-in. While I am sure they’re out there on the Docker hub repository, I was not able to easily find any images that met my specific needs . So I went ahead and setup my own repository on Docker Hub.

Something I learnt today was that a docker stack only accepts pre-built images. Which essentially means you cannot use the regular build command on the fly in your docker-compose file. A quick work-around to that is to build the image locally and then publish it to a public repository from where the stack can easily access it.

• Create a dockerfile: sudo nano dockerfile
• Copy over contents from my dockerfile gist. Edit or update if you need any additional extensions. Do note that I am pulling a debian buster image here. An alpine image would be optimal but lets’ run with this for now.
• Build the image locally:
  docker build -t sriperinkulam/php-7.4.3-apache-buster-plus:latest .

Edit the image and tag name as needed. If your gist file is defined correctly, the image should be ready in a few minutes. It took me a few iterations to get this working with all the extensions I needed and shouldn’t give you any errors during the build process.

• Login to your Dockerhub repo: docker login
• Push your image over to your repository:
  docker push sriperinkulam/php-7.4.3-apache-buster-plus:latest
• Within a few minutes, your image should be available for easy fetch whenever needed!

 

Setting up and deploying the Known install

• Create a folder for the known installation:

sudo mkdir known && cd known

• Copy over my ‘known.yml’ gist from here and paste into a known.yml file.

sudo nano known.yml

This is where we use the image we built earlier! Make sure you update the passwords there-in.

• Create an ‘app’ folder. This is where we will copy in the core known package.

sudo mkdir app && cd app

Marcus Povey does the heavy lifting of packaging the known install ‘unofficially’. Download his latest pre-packaged release from his portal.

wget https://withknown.marcus-povey.co.uk/<package>

Finally unzip/untar the package.

• Step back into the main ‘known’ directory and deploy the stack that we defined in the known.yml file.

cd ..

DOMAIN=known.domain.org SCHEME=https docker stack deploy -c known.yml known

• Assuming you’ve already setup the traefik container, as mentioned in my Jitsi post, you should now have Known up and running. Navigate to the domain and you should see the warmup page.

• Key in the db credentials that you setup in the known.yml file. The database would need to be set as mariadb, since that’s how we’ve defined it in the known.yml file. Also make sure you have the Uploads folder writable by www-data:

sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/html/Uploads/

Setup your user account and proceed with the regular administration controls!