Dockerising Contao 4

Last year, we moved the website of our department from Typo3 to Contao version 3. I wrote about that in Dockerising a Contao website and Dockerising a Contao website II. Now it was time to upgrade from Contao version 3 to 4. And as usual: Things have changed… So, how to jail a Contao 4 into a Docker container?

Similar to Contao 3, we use two images for our Contao 4 site. One is a general Contao 4 installation, the other one is our personalised version.

A general Contao 4 image

The general Contao 4 is based on an PHP image that includes an Apache webserver. In addition, we need to

• install a few dependencies,
• enable some Apache modules,
• install some extra PHP extensions,
• install Composer,
• and finally use Composer to install Contao.

This time, I outsourced the installation of Composer into a seperate script install-composer.sh:

#!/bin/sh

EXPECTED_SIGNATURE="$(wget -q -O - https://composer.github.io/installer.sig)"
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
ACTUAL_SIGNATURE="$(php -r "echo hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php');")"

if [ "$EXPECTED_SIGNATURE" != "$ACTUAL_SIGNATURE" ]
then
    >&2 echo 'ERROR: Invalid installer signature'
    rm composer-setup.php
    exit 1
fi

mkdir -p /composer/packages

php -d memory_limit=-1 composer-setup.php --install-dir=/composer
RESULT=$?
rm composer-setup.php
#chown -R www-data: /composer

exit $RESULT

Thus, you’ll find a current composer installation in /composer.

The Dockerfile for the general image then boils down to the following:

FROM php:7-apache
MAINTAINER martin scharm <https://binfalse.de/contact/>

RUN apt-get update \
 && apt-get install -y -q --no-install-recommends \
    wget \
    curl \
    unzip \
    zlib1g-dev \
    libpng-dev \
    libjpeg62-turbo \
    libjpeg62-turbo-dev \
    libcurl4-openssl-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev \
    libmcrypt-dev \
    libxml2-dev \
    libzip-dev \
    ssmtp \
 && apt-get clean \
 && rm -r /var/lib/apt/lists/* \
 && a2enmod expires headers rewrite

RUN docker-php-source extract \
 && docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/ \
 && docker-php-ext-install -j$(nproc) zip gd curl pdo pdo_mysql soap intl \
 && docker-php-source delete

ADD install-composer.sh /install-composer.sh

RUN bash /install-composer.sh \
 && chown -R www-data: /var/www

USER www-data

RUN php -d memory_limit=-1 /composer/composer.phar create-project contao/managed-edition /var/www/html '4.4.*'

PLEASE NOTE: sSMTP is not maintained anymore! Please switch to msmtp, for example, as I explained in Migrating from sSMTP to msmtp.

This image includes the package for sSMTP to enable support for mails. To learn how to configure sSMTP, have a look into my earlier article Mail support for Docker’s php:fpm.

Alltogether, this gives us a proper recipe to get a dockerised Contao 4. It is also available from the Docker Hub as binfalse/contao.

A personalised Contao 4 image

Based on that general Docker image, you can now create your personalised Docker image. There is a template in the corresponding Github repository.

A few things worth mentioning:

• After installing additional contao modules, you should clear Contao’s cache using:

RUN php -q -d memory_limit=-1 /var/www/html/vendor/contao/manager-bundle/bin/contao-console cache:clear --env=prod --no-warmup

• Contao still does not respect the HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO… Thus, if running behind a reverse proxy, Contao assumes its accessed through plain HTTP and won’t deliver HTTPS links. I explained that in Contao 3: HTTPS vs HTTP. However, the workaround for Contao 3 doesn’t work anymore - and there seems to be no proper solution for Contao 4. Therefore, we need to inject some code into the app.php… Yes, you read correctly… Ugly, but anyway, can easily be done using:

RUN sed -i.bak 's%/\*%$_SERVER["HTTPS"] = 1;/*%' /var/www/html/web/app.php

• The composer-based installation apparently fails to set the files’ links. Thus we need to do it manually:

RUN mkdir -p /var/www/html/files && ln -s /var/www/html/files /var/www/html/web/files

Everything else should be pretty self-explaining…

Tying things together

Use Docker-Compose or whatever to spawn a container of your personalised image (similar to Contao 3: Docker-Compose).

Just make sure, you mount a few things correctly into the container:

• your files need to go to /var/www/html/files
• Contao’s configuration belongs to /var/www/html/system/config/*.php, as usual
• Symfony’s configuration belongs to /var/www/html/app/config/parameters.yml and /var/www/html/app/config/config.yml
• For the mail configuration see Mail support for Docker’s php:fpm

Please note, that the database connection must be configured in Symfony’s parameters.yml! Instead of Contao’s localconfig.php, as it used to be for Contao 3.