Emoncms Docker

We have made the first steps towards running Emoncms to run in a Docker container.

Dockerfiles and setup notes are in the emoncms-docker repository:

https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms-docker

Docker is an exciting tool to help make development, testing and deployment of web-applications easier.

What is docker? (the short version):

Docker containers wrap a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything needed to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything that can be installed on a server. This guarantees that the software will always run the same, regardless of its environment.

What is docker? (the long version):

Docker is an open-source platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. As a result, IT can ship faster and run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data center VMs, and any cloud.

Quick Start

$ docker pull openenergymonitor/emoncms
$ git clone https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms-docker
$ cd emoncms-docker
$ docker-compose up

That’s it! Emoncms should now be runnning, browse to http://localhost:8080

Emoncms Docker

Using Docker it’s possible to fire up Emoncms on a bare system (assuming Docker is installed) in a couple of minutes with all the LAMP install & config taken care of.

This is great for development since it’s possible to play about with Emoncms running in a Docker container without fear of messing up your system or production Emoncms install.

In the future, Docker can even be used as a deployment tool for Emoncms. In theory, it should possible to deploy the Emoncms Docker container on any server within minutes.

We have taken a multi-container approach with php-apache running in one container and the MYSQL database running in another. The containers are linked using docker-compose.

See emoncms-docker Readme for setup & build instructions.

Note: The Emoncms docker setup is currently in development and not recomended for production Emoncms deployment just yet.

Forum discussion

See this forum topic for discussion.