Installation without user intervention

bkolobara

Hi,

I'm trying to automatise provisioning of flarum instances. Each instance will run inside a docker container and get an automatically created DB assigned. As we want to do this without the user needing to enter anything we need to preconfigure the instance.

I have now 2 questions:

Can the first installation run from a script without the user visiting the webpage and entering the required database information.
Is all dynamic data stored inside the DB? If an instance is killed, can a new one be assigned to the same DB and all data will survive?

Cheers,
Bernard

luceos

bkolobara

yes, there is a command php flarum install
yes, most likely this won't cause issues

bkolobara

luceos Thanks for the fast replay!

When I run php flarum install in the flarum folder I get an error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'flarum_test.flarum_settings' doesn't exist in /usr/share/nginx/flarum/vendor/illuminate/database/Connection.php:319

Where is this flarum script located? And is there some documentation about all arguments it takes?

EDIT: I realised what the issue is. I already create a preconfigured config.php and it should not exist before running php flarum install

bkolobara

I can supply to flarum install a config file with:

php flarum install --file config.yml

But what is the format of this config.yml? And is it safe to run this command multiple times on an already initialised database?

existo

I'm not sure if its documented somewhere, but take a look at this example:

---
databaseConfiguration:
    driver: mysql
    host: localhost
    database: database
    username: user
    password: userpassword
adminUser:
    username: flarumUser
    password: flarumUserPassword
    password_confirmation: flarumUserPassword
    email: flarumUserEmail
baseUrl: https://flarum.dev

bkolobara

existo Thanks a lot!

I was just reading the source and tried to figure out how it works. There are also settings fields that you can set (like forum title). Here is a list of them: https://github.com/flarum/core/blob/v0.1.0-beta.6/src/Install/Console/DefaultsDataProvider.php#L33

This is how my config.yml ended up looking

baseUrl: 'http://localhost:8080'
databaseConfiguration:
  driver: 'mysql'
  host: 'xxx.xxx.32.235'
  database: 'flarum_test'
  username: 'flarum_test'
  password: 'xxxxxxxxxx'
  prefix: 'flarum_'
adminUser:
  username: 'admin'
  password: 'xxxxxxxx'
  password_confirmation: 'xxxxxxxx'
  email: 'admin@example.com'
settings:
  forum_title: 'Hello world'

And to answer my question from before. No, it's not safe to run twice php flarum install --file config.yml. It fails saying that a table in the database exist. And it messes up the installation.

webeindustry

Hey. My company first started with docker & proved automation here before advancing to k8s (still using docker as the container foundation). 1 is entirely obtainable, 2 needs to be better qualified.

You can restore a vanilla instance from a base flarum docker image & database, but it will be borked if you don't have a few things: avatars, composer.json, & vendor files not in base need to persist.

bkolobara

webeindustry Thanks for the feedback.

I understand that avatars hold uploaded profile pictures, but what does composer.json and vendor files contain? Extensions?

I'm doing something similar, provisioning flarum instances on a k8s cluster. I will need to figure out how to solve the problem with persistent volumes in this case.

webeindustry

It's a heck of a lot more complicated on a k8s cluster than you may be considering. Vendor files hold the extensions which clients will be installing, plus all their dependencies, and composer.json holds the information for all the packages installed.

Our getup has 5 master nodes with galera & glusterfs, plus pacemaker running on top of k8s. I'd suggest spending the time to figure out how to get pacemaker to play well with kube if you're going the route of a true cluster which will require quorum. Be prepared to dig into the core components & apply quite a bit of magic.

This may provide some insight into the level of complexity necessary for proper HA on a k8s bare-metal cluster:

Good Luck!