Deploy October CMS With Docker

October is a free, open-source, self-hosted CMS platform based on the Laravel PHP Framework. This tutorial will teach you how to easily deploy October CMS using docker, but if you wish to get more information on using October CMS, then I would recommend going to the tutorials page.

Steps

Deploy an Ubuntu 18.04 Server with at least 1GB of RAM. Add some swap too if you are on something like DigitalOcean that uses local SSDs.

Install docker.

Install docker-compose

Download the latest October CMS release:

wget https://github.com/octobercms/october/archive/v1.1.0.tar.gz
tar --extract --gzip --file v1.1.0.tar.gz
rm v1.1.0.tar.gz
mv -i october-1.1.0 octobercms

Create a docker-compose.yml file on your server with the following (editing the DB_PASSWORD and MYSQL_PASSWORD to something else, but matching each other).

editor $HOME/octobercms/docker-compose.yml

version: '2.2'
services:
  web:
    container_name: web
    restart: always
    image: aspendigital/octobercms:latest
    ports:
      - 80:80
    environment:
      - DB_TYPE=mysql
      - DB_HOST=db #DB_HOST should match the service name of the database container
      - DB_DATABASE=octobercms
      - DB_USERNAME=octobercms
      - DB_PASSWORD=octobercms
    volumes:
      - $HOME/octobercms/plugins:/var/www/html/plugins
      - $HOME/octobercms/storage/app:/var/www/html/storage/app
      - $HOME/octobercms/storage/logs:/var/www/html/storage/logs
      - $HOME/octobercms/themes:/var/www/html/themes

  db:
    image: mariadb
    container_name: db
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: 1
      MYSQL_DATABASE: octobercms
      MYSQL_USER: octobercms
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: octobercms
    volumes:
       - $HOME/volumes/mysql/data:/var/lib/mysql

Start Services In Order

For the first startup, we want to "warm up" the database to make sure it's ready, so start it on its own:

docker-compose up db

When it appears to have stopped outputting the console and says:

[Note] mysqld: ready for connections.

Then start up the web application:

docker-compose up web

Fix Permissions

The web user needs to be able to edit the content in the plugins, storage, and themes folders/volumes, so run the following commands:

docker-compose exec web chown -R www-data /var/www/html/plugins
docker-compose exec web chown -R www-data /var/www/html/storage/app
docker-compose exec web chown -R www-data /var/www/html/storage/logs
docker-compose exec web chown -R www-data /var/www/html/themes

Run Migrations

Now run the following command to run database migrations (create the table structures etc).

docker-compose exec web php artisan october:up

Log Into the Backend

Navigate to your server's IP/hostname and append /backend to the URL. Then login with admin for the username and password.

Future Starting Up

You only had to perform the previous steps (such as starting the services in order, and running database migrations) once. From now on, you can just navigate to the octobercms folder and run:

docker-compose up

Adding HTTPS/SSL

I used an nginx reverse proxy (jwilder/nginx-proxy) to achieve SSL/HTTPS support by altering my docker-compose.yml configuration to be like so:

version: '2.2'
services:
  reverse-proxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
      - $HOME/volumes/ssl:/etc/nginx/certs

  web:
    container_name: web
    restart: always
    image: aspendigital/octobercms:latest
#    ports:
#      - 80:80
    environment:
      - DB_TYPE=mysql
      - DB_HOST=db #DB_HOST should match the service name of the database container
      - DB_DATABASE=octobercms
      - DB_USERNAME=octobercms
      - DB_PASSWORD=octobercms
      - CMS_LINK_POLICY=secure
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=www.mydomain.com,mydomain.com
      - VIRTUAL_PROTO=http
      - VIRTUAL_PORT=80
      - CERT_NAME=mydomain.com
    volumes:
      - $HOME/octobercms/plugins:/var/www/html/plugins
      - $HOME/octobercms/storage/app:/var/www/html/storage/app
      - $HOME/octobercms/storage/logs:/var/www/html/storage/logs
      - $HOME/octobercms/themes:/var/www/html/themes

  db:
    image: mariadb
    container_name: db
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: 1
      MYSQL_DATABASE: octobercms
      MYSQL_USER: octobercms
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: octobercms
    volumes:
       - $HOME/volumes/mysql/data:/var/lib/mysql

In this example, I am using a wildcard certificate for *.mydomain.com as discussed here.

• The CMS_LINK_POLICY=secure fixes the issue whereby stylesheets would otherwise try to load over http instead of https and then get blocked by the browser (the web application thinks it is running in plain http).
• Notice that port 80 on the web service is now commented out as that is also handled by the reverse proxy.
• You will need to put your certificate files in a folder at $HOME/volumes/ssl with the same name as your CERT_NAME value, with the extensions .crt and .key for the combined certificate and the private key.

Themes

When working on this recently, there were URLs being passed to | theme filter, which weren't getting translated to https even with the CMS_LINK_POLICY set so I ended up having to hardcode them.

References

• Dockerhub - aspendigital/octobercms