ytjohn/elgg repository overview

⁠Elgg in Docker

This is Elgg⁠, an open-source social neworking engine, packaged in a Docker container. Currently, it is built against Elgg 3.1.0 and php-fpm⁠. The ytjohn/elgg container is not enough to get an app going, you need to combine it with something like Nginx or Apahe, and a database server. The docker-compose⁠ uses Nginx. Each container is pinned to a specific version to ensure that it continues to work as desired, even if a breaking change is made upstream. While this setup is primarily for development, it could easily be ported to work in production.

⁠Development

To test this out, just clone this repo and use docker-compose to bring it up.

    git clone https://github.com.ytjohn/elgg-docker.git
    cd elgg-docker
    docker-compose up

Once it starts up, elgg will be listening on [http://localhost:8080]. You if you didn't change anything in docker-compose.yml, your setup information is:

• database username: elgg
• database password: elggpassword
• databases name: elgg
• database host: db
• database port: 3306
• database table prefix: _elgg
• data directory: /elggdata
• site url: http://localhost:8080/⁠

This has persistent volumes, so your data will persist across restarts and reboots. To stop, hit Ctrl-C.

⁠Web and Elgg containers

The elgg container exposes /elgg and /elggdata as volumes. PHP-FPM is running in this container on port 9000, and the nginx (web) container links to it. In order for nging to read static files, it shares the "volumes_from" the elgg container (/elgg and /elggdata). The nginx/web container does not have php installed and is just acting as a form of proxy to the php-fpm and serving any static files.

⁠Development

This repo is to be a base for your development. It is recommend that you fork the repo so you can add your own changes to docker-compose. Let's say you want to develop a theme. We'll assume that your theme is called "mytheme" and is up a directory from where docker-compose lives.

Tip: I use custom_index⁠ as my starting theme.

Edit the defintion of the "elgg" container in docker-compose.yaml:

    elgg:
        image: ytjohn/elgg:3.1.0
        volumes:
            - ./extra/php/zz-log.conf:/usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/zz-log.conf
            - elggdata:/elggdata 
            - ../mytheme:/elgg/mod/mytheme
        links:
        - db

Now, next time restart the contents of ../mytheme will appear in /elgg/mod/mytheme. You can now edit files in that directory, activate the theme in Elgg's web interface, and view the results in real-time.