Setting up a drupal development env using docker image on mac os.

I have been trying to try various ways in which i can make building and destroying development environments quickly and also make them as close to production as possible, i have tried using vagrant before till i was bitten by the docker bug.

There is an official docker image for drupal 8 and drupal 8 on the docker hub, i have tried using them before it wasn't a great wow moment to be honest.

Creating a drupal image using official drupal docker image form docker hub.

The docker image did not have drush or drupal console so it was a bit disappointing. I searched and came across https://hub.docker.com/r/iiiepe/nginx-drupal/ The guys have done a lot of work in using docker in their deployment workflow, so i wanted to give this a try.

I could have used docker hub to pull the iiiepe image, but i wanted to see what is inside and if i need to make changes i could.

I first created a folder in my docker subfolder, I normally keep docker images and my projects separate. I checked out the git repo https://github.com/iiiepe/docker-nginx-drupal

Obviously you need to have docker installed and configured properly, you can find a lot of tutorials for this on the internet, but basically you need to start your default docker machine i.e.

docker-machine start default

then, set the env like so

docker-machine env default

and type the command with eval() in the output of docker-machine env default command.

Now i am ready to create the docker images as below:

I went to the folder which has the dockerfile, then gave the following command

docker build -t drupalprogrammer/nginx-drupal .

This will pull appropriate images and begin to build images, in a few mins this will be all done and you can check the images by giving the docker images command

We will also need a mysql image for our drupal container to work with, we could have gone for the official mysql image however it doesnt work very well with os x because we want to keep the data outside the container and there is some work required to create scripts to allow this to happen.

There is instructions on the official mysql images page i.e. https://hub.docker.com/_/mysql/ i tried to use the instructions to load the data outside but could not get it to work. Luckily little googling led me to another image we can use.

run the following command:

docker run --name mysql-data -v /Users/nidash/data:/var/lib/mysql -p 3306:3306 -d dgraziotin/mysql

This will pull dgraziotin/mysql image and expose the 3306 port to use.

Now give the following command docker ps this shows the some-mysql container working, great job. 

The first time you create the container this will also create an additional user called admin with a random generated password, to find the password you need to look at the docker logs like so.

docker logs mysql-data

So this shows the password like below:

You can now connect to this MySQL Server using: mysql -uadmin -p47nnf4FweaKu -h -P Please remember to change the above password as soon as possible! MySQL user 'root' has no password but only allows local connections

Using a mysql client connect to the mysql server and change your password eg.

SET PASSWORD FOR 'admin'@'%' = PASSWORD('password');

Now we need to the drupal container to be up as well, so here is the command to use.

docker run -d -p 8000:80 -v /Users/nidash/work/drupal7/:/var/www -v /Users/nidash/work/drupal7/sites/all/default/files:/var/www/sites/default/files  drupalprogrammer/nginx-drupal

We need to map 2 volumes, /Users/nidash/work/drupal7 or where the codebase is to /var/www and because drupal is drupal and has files inside the code base, we need to map and mount this separately hence the other -v.

Complete the installation and that is it. Ensure the database host name is set as the IP the docker-machine env default command reports.