pikapods/docker-suitecrm repository overview

⁠docker-suitecrm

SuiteCRM 7⁠ container image, built on serversideup/php⁠.

This image powers SuiteCRM on PikaPods⁠ and is maintained by the PikaPods team. It's published here for our users' reference and the benefit of the wider community.

Published to both ghcr.io/pikapods/docker-suitecrm:<suitecrm-version> and pikapods/docker-suitecrm:<suitecrm-version> (Docker Hub).

Source: https://github.com/pikapods/docker-suitecrm⁠

⁠Why this image

A small, maintainable SuiteCRM 7 image: a short entrypoint, idempotent boot that runs SuiteCRM's silent installer on first start, and a daily auto-rebuild against upstream SuiteCRM releases. We do not fork Bitnami's image (now abandoned) — this is a clean replacement built on the same conventions as docker-freescout⁠.

⁠Quick start

The bundled compose.yaml brings up SuiteCRM plus a MySQL 8 sidecar:

git clone https://github.com/pikapods/docker-suitecrm.git
cd docker-suitecrm
docker compose up -d
# wait ~1-3 minutes for the silent installer to run on first boot
curl -sI 'http://localhost:8080/index.php?module=Users&action=Login'   # → HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Default credentials are admin / changeme — change them before any real deployment.

Against an existing MySQL/MariaDB:

docker run -d --name suitecrm \
  -v suitecrm-data:/data \
  -e APP_URL="https://crm.example.com" \
  -e DB_HOST=db.internal \
  -e DB_NAME=suitecrm \
  -e DB_USER=suitecrm \
  -e DB_PASS=... \
  -e ADMIN_USER=admin \
  -e ADMIN_PASS=changeme \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  ghcr.io/pikapods/docker-suitecrm:latest

⁠Environment variables

⁠Core

The silent installer does not accept an admin email — set the admin's email address in the UI after first login.

⁠Cron

SuiteCRM's Schedulers (inbound email, workflows, reminders, AOR reports) are non-functional without per-minute cron, so the default is TRUE.

⁠Boot behaviour

On first boot the bootstrap script:

1. Waits up to 30 s for MySQL on ${DB_HOST}:${DB_PORT}.
2. Renders a config_si.php from environment variables.
3. Starts a transient php -S 127.0.0.1:8765 and hits install.php?goto=SilentInstall&cli=true.
4. Verifies that installer_locked => true was written into /data/config.php and removes config_si.php.

On every subsequent boot the bootstrap reconciles the live env values for site_url, db_host_name, db_port, db_user_name, db_password, and db_name into /data/config.php. Other keys are preserved untouched — the installer's unique_key, anything you've set via Studio or Admin Panel, custom mail tuning, etc.

Silent install logs are streamed to the container's stderr; on failure the response body is dumped (first 200 lines) before the container exits.

⁠Mounts

⁠What persists

The image symlinks these paths into /data at build time:

⁠What does NOT persist — Module Loader caveat

modules/ and themes/ are not symlinked. Packages installed via the Module Loader (under Admin → Module Loader) write into these trees and will disappear when you pull a new image tag.

The supported customisation path is Studio (under Admin → Studio) — Studio writes into custom/, which is persisted.

If you rely on community Module Loader packages, reinstall them after each image upgrade, or fork this image and bake them in.

⁠User & permissions

Both nginx and php-fpm run as www-data (UID 82 / GID 82 — Alpine's default). How those writes surface on the host depends on your runtime:

The bootstrap runs a preflight writability check on /data and refuses to start with a readable error if ownership is wrong.

⁠Ports

⁠MySQL notes

The bundled compose.yaml uses mysql:8 with --default-authentication-plugin=caching_sha2_password. PHP 8.x supports caching_sha2_password natively. If you point the image at an older client toolchain or hit Authentication plugin 'caching_sha2_password' cannot be loaded, swap to mysql_native_password on the user:

ALTER USER 'suitecrm'@'%' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '...';

MariaDB is supported as a drop-in for MySQL — the image's setup_db_type is hard-coded to mysql, which works for both. Pre-create the database and user before pointing the image at it (the bootstrap sets setup_db_create_database=false).

⁠Building locally

docker build \
  --build-arg SUITECRM_VERSION=7.15.1 \
  --build-arg PHP_VERSION=8.4 \
  -t suitecrm:test .

⁠Testing

pip install -r tests/requirements.txt

# Fast image-shape tests (no daemon-side runtime).
IMAGE=suitecrm:test pytest -v tests/ -m "not runtime"

# Full smoke (boots a real MySQL + container, ~3 minutes).
IMAGE=suitecrm:test pytest -v tests/test_runtime.py -m runtime

⁠License

SuiteCRM is AGPL-3.0; this image inherits that license.