TYPO3 Flow in Docker

This repository contains a Docker base image for building containerized TYPO3 Flow applications.

Use for development

While in development, you may want to mount your TYPO3 Flow application from a host-local directory into your container.

To do this, start your container like this:

docker run --name flow-db \
           -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret \
           -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=othersecret \
           -e MYSQL_USER=flow \
           -e MYSQL_DATABASE=flow \
           mariadb:latest --character-set-server=utf8 --collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
docker run --name flow-web \
           --link flow-db:db \
           -v $PWD:/var/www \
           -p 80:80 \
           martinhelmich/flow:dev

The -v $PWD:/var/www mounts your local working directory into the container's /var/www directory, from which the Flow application is served. The -p 80:80 maps the container port 80 to your host port 80, allowing your TYPO3 Flow application to be accessed by http://localhost.

Use for production

In production, you'd typically want to bake your TYPO3 Flow application into a custom Docker image. This is possible with this image, too, due to an ONBUILD ADD . /var/www instruction in the Dockerfile.

Simply include a custom Dockerfile in your Flow application's root directory with the following contents:

FROM martinhelmich/flow:prod

Then build the image:

docker build -t you/custom-flow-app .

And run it:

docker run --name flow-web \
           --link flow-db:db \
           -p 80:80 \
           you/custom-flow-app

The prod image differs from the dev image in a few aspects:

1. Of course, the FLOW_CONTEXT environment variable is set to PRODUCTION in the prod image. You can, however, override it on container creation (usually with the -e FLOW_CONTEXT=... flag).
2. On startup, the TYPO3 Flow Cache will be warmed up by executing a ./flow flow:cache:warmup on startup.
3. Furthermore, Doctrine migration will be executed if necessary on startup (unless the FLOW_DB_DISABLE environment variable was set).

Special behaviours

If you link a database container into the application container and use db as the link alias, the start script will automatically write a Settings.yaml file containing the database credentials needed for connecting to the linked container.

Running Flow shell commands

The easiest way to run Flow CLI commands is to use the docker-flow command line tool. This command actually links a new, transient container to your application container and executes the command in that container.

First, install the docker-flow CLI tool into your Flow application:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/martin-helmich/docker-flow/master/docker-flow > docker-flow
chmod +x docker-flow

Then use it like the conventional flow command line utility, specifying the name of your application container as the first parameter:

./docker-flow flow-web flow:cache:warmup

Various administration tasks

You can use the general Docker commands to run arbitrary commands or even start an interactive shell for your TYPO3 Flow application.

Start a shell in a new container linked to the application container:

docker run --rm -it --volumes-from <app-container-name> --user flow --workdir /var/www martinhelmich/flow:dev bash

You can also use docker exec to run administrative commands inside the same container:

docker exec <app-container-name> supervisorctl restart nginx