Building a quick mysql / ghost blogdocker container serving a database.

Ghost blog is absolutely fantastic for standing up for internal documentation projects to a local machine with very little effort on your part.  Then you can access that documentation from anywhere.

• Install docker / docker-compose (because it is constantly changing names / configurations we can just look at it..)

apt search docker | grep docker

We want the docker.io / docker-compose

sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose mysql-client-core-8.0

We can now confirm that it is running with:

docker ps -a

Now we want to make a directory for each container for the docker-compose.yaml. (as root).

mkdir mysql  && cd mysql && nano docker-compose.yml

In it put:

version: '2'

services:
  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0
    ports:
      - 3306:3306
    volumes:
      - ./mysql:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: 'mysqlpassword'

There are two ways to stand it up:

• Test mode as in:

docker-compose up

Will give you lots of diagnostic logs to see how it is working as in:

Once you are satisfied you can put it into permanent mode as in:

docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d  # Daemon mode run forever

Now we want to see if we can connect locally to the machine.

mysql -u root -p

If all goes well you will see it as:

However to grant global login access you may need to amend it as:

CREATE USER 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

• Understand that 'root'@'%' is not the same as 'root'@'localhost' is not the same as 'root'@'127.0.0.1'  each one can have different permissions.
• The nice thing about this is a very clean organized container that can hold a database separate from other containers.  Lets say you have a scenario where you want to have multiple segregated databases on the same machine, instead of having to deal with user permissions - you can easily stand up a container and simply open a separate port for each one.
• Docker handles the plumbing well. the simple option of 3306:3306 mapped it to the external network easily.

Now adding the ghost blog. In another directory (ghost) make another docker-compose.yml and put:

version: '3.1'
name: container-name
services:

  ghost:
    image: ghost:4-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8080:2368
    environment:
      # see https://ghost.org/docs/config/#configuration-options
      database__client: mysql
      database__connection__host: 127.0.0.1  #Or external ip..
      database__connection__user: 'root'
      database__connection__password: 'your_password'
      database__connection__database: ghost
      # this url value is just an example, and is likely wrong for your environment!
      url: https://www.hotconfig.com/
      # contrary to the default mentioned in the linked documentation, this image defaults to NODE_ENV=production (so development mode needs to be explicitly specified if desired)
      #NODE_ENV: development

• Note in this instance 127.0.0.1 created a permission error, as noted above 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES TO' – In this instance I would actually need to create a user 'root'@'locahost' and grant it all privileges etc.
• By changing the 127.0.0.1 to the external IP it worked perfectly with the non-daemon mode showing in the log that this is working great.
• First run will go like this:

You will need to go into firefox to stop it from forcing https connections as in about:config and then set to false:

And then set this for 'http' not 'https'

• This was a bit janky - but it did work.

You should see a half-decent login finally.

Summary: What is very nice about this is one can easily have multiple co-habitating blogs on the same server each with their own posts and their own ports!