bitnami/rails
Bitnami container image for Ruby on Rails
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Rails is a web application framework running on the Ruby programming language.
Overview of Rails Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.
docker run --name rails bitnami/rails:latest
Warning: This quick setup is only intended for development environments. You are encouraged to change the insecure default credentials and check out the available configuration options for the MariaDB container for a more secure deployment.
Looking to use Rails in production? Try VMware Tanzu Application Catalog, the commercial edition of the Bitnami catalog.
Starting December 10th 2024, only the latest stable branch of any container will receive updates in the free Bitnami catalog. To access up-to-date releases for all upstream-supported branches, consider upgrading to Bitnami Premium. Previous versions already released will not be deleted. They are still available to pull from DockerHub.
Please check the Bitnami Premium page in our partner Arrow Electronics for more information.
Dockerfile
linksLearn more about the Bitnami tagging policy and the difference between rolling tags and immutable tags in our documentation page.
You can see the equivalence between the different tags by taking a look at the tags-info.yaml
file present in the branch folder, i.e bitnami/ASSET/BRANCH/DISTRO/tags-info.yaml
.
Subscribe to project updates by watching the bitnami/containers GitHub repo.
Ruby on Rails, or simply Rails, is a web application framework written in Ruby under MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages.
The Bitnami Rails Development Container has been carefully engineered to provide you and your team with a highly reproducible Rails development environment. We hope you find the Bitnami Rails Development Container useful in your quest for world domination. Happy hacking!
Learn more about Bitnami Development Containers.
The quickest way to get started with the Bitnami Rails Development Container is using docker-compose.
Begin by creating a directory for your Rails application:
mkdir ~/myapp
cd ~/myapp
Download the docker-compose.yml file in the application directory:
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bitnami/containers/main/bitnami/rails/docker-compose.yml
Finally launch the Rails application development environment using:
docker-compose up
Among other things, the above command creates a container service, named myapp
, for Rails development and bootstraps a new Rails application in the application directory. You can use your favourite IDE for developing the application.
Note
If the application directory contained the source code of an existing Rails application, the Bitnami Rails Development Container would load the existing application instead of bootstrapping a new one.
After the WEBrick application server has been launched in the myapp
service, visit http://localhost:3000
in your favourite web browser and you'll be greeted by the default Rails welcome page.
In addition to the Rails Development Container, the docker-compose.yml file also configures a MariaDB service to serve as the database backend of your Rails application.
Commands can be launched inside the myapp
Rails Development Container with docker-compose
using the exec command.
Note:
The
exec
command was added todocker-compose
in release 1.7.0. Please ensure that you're usingdocker-compose
version1.7.0
or higher.
The general structure of the exec
command is:
docker-compose exec <service> <command>
, where <service>
is the name of the container service as described in the docker-compose.yml
file and <command>
is the command you want to launch inside the service.
Following are a few examples of launching some commonly used Rails development commands inside the myapp
service container.
List all available rake tasks:
docker-compose exec myapp bundle exec rake -T
Get information about the Rails environment:
docker-compose exec myapp bundle exec rake about
Launch the Rails console:
docker-compose exec myapp rails console
Generate a scaffold:
docker-compose exec myapp rails generate scaffold User name:string email:string
Run database migrations:
docker-compose exec myapp bundle exec rake db:migrate
Note
Database migrations are automatically applied during the start up of the Rails Development Container. This means that the
myapp
service could also be restarted to apply the database migrations.
$ docker-compose restart myapp
Name | Description | Default Value |
---|---|---|
RAILS_ENV | Rails environment mode. | development |
RAILS_SKIP_ACTIVE_RECORD | Skip active record configuration. | no |
RAILS_SKIP_DB_SETUP | Skip database configuration. | no |
RAILS_SKIP_DB_WAIT | Skip waiting for database to be ready. | no |
RAILS_RETRY_ATTEMPTS | Rails retry attempts. | 30 |
RAILS_DATABASE_TYPE | Database server type. | mariadb |
RAILS_DATABASE_HOST | Database server host. | mariadb |
RAILS_DATABASE_PORT_NUMBER | Database server port. | 3306 |
RAILS_DATABASE_NAME | Database name. | bitnami_myapp |
You can configure the MariaDB hostname and database name to use for development purposes using the environment variables DATABASE_HOST & DATABASE_NAME.
For example, you can configure your Rails app to use the development-db
database running on the my-mariadb
MariaDB server by modifying the docker-compose.yml
file present in this repository:
services:
myapp:
...
environment:
- DATABASE_HOST=my-mariadb
- DATABASE_NAME=development-db
...
Sometimes, your application will require extra pieces, such as background processing tools like Resque or Sidekiq.
For these cases, it is possible to re-use this container to be run as an additional service in your docker-compose file by modifying the command executed.
For example, you could run a Sidekiq container by adding the following to the docker-compose.yml
file present in this repository:
services:
...
sidekiq:
image: bitnami/rails:latest
environment:
# This skips the execution of rake db:create and db:migrate
# since it is being executed by the rails service.
- SKIP_DB_SETUP=true
command: bundle exec sidekiq
...
Note
You can skip database wait period and creation/migration by setting the SKIP_DB_WAIT and SKIP_DB_SETUP environment variables.
To add a Rubygem to your application, update the Gemfile
in the application directory as you would normally do and restart the myapp
service container.
For example, to add the httparty
Rubygem:
echo "gem 'httparty'" >> Gemfile
docker-compose restart myapp
When the myapp
service container is restarted, it will install all the missing gems before starting the WEBrick Rails application server.
rootfs/
folder.docker-compose.yaml
Please be aware this file has not undergone internal testing. Consequently, we advise its use exclusively for development or testing purposes.
If you detect any issue in the docker-compose.yaml
file, feel free to report it or contribute with a fix by following our Contributing Guidelines.
We'd love for you to contribute to this container. You can request new features by creating an issue or submitting a pull request with your contribution.
If you encountered a problem running this container, you can file an issue. Be sure to include the following information in your issue:
docker version
)docker info
Copyright © 2025 Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.