Installing Alfresco 6 Community Edition in Ubuntu using Docker Compose

[angelborroy]

Installation methods

Alfresco Content Services can be installed in some different ways:

• On premise
  • Using provided ZIP Distribution files. You can follow this tutorial from @abhinavmishra14 describing how to use this artifacts: https://javaworld-abhinav.blogspot.com/2020/12/setup-acs62-ga-and-ass14-distribution-stepbystep.html
  • Using Ansible templates. You can use this project from @jpotts to install Alfresco using Ansible: https://github.com/jpotts/ansible-alfresco
• Docker Compose installation will be covered in this blog post. Additional details are provided in https://docs.alfresco.com/community/concepts/deploy-overview.html
• Kubernetes, mainly recommended for large Enterprise deployments. Details are available in https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-deployment/blob/master/docs/helm/README.md

Alfresco Docker Images

The public Alfresco Docker images are available in the Docker Hub registry.

Go to Docker Hub https://hub.docker.com/u/alfresco/ to see a list of images belonging to the alfresco user.

There are a number of Docker images that relate to Alfresco Community Edition:

• alfresco/alfresco-content-repository-community - the repository app (i.e. alfresco.war) running on Apache Tomcat
• alfresco/alfresco-share - the Share web interface (i.e. share.war) running on Apache Tomcat
• alfresco/alfresco-search-services - the Solr 6 based search service running on Jetty
• alfresco/alfresco-activemq - the Alfresco ActiveMQ image
• alfresco/acs-community-ngnix - Http Web Proxy to provide access to every service using the same port

The source code to build these Docker Images is available in Alfresco GitHub page.

• alfresco/alfresco-content-repository-community - https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-community-packaging
• alfresco/alfresco-share - https://github.com/Alfresco/share/tree/develop/packaging/docker
• alfresco/alfresco-search-services - https://github.com/Alfresco/SearchServices/tree/master/search-services/packaging/src/docker
• alfresco/alfresco-activemq - https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-docker-activemq
• alfresco/acs-community-ngnix - https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-ingress/tree/acs-community-ingress

There are also other supporting features available, such as Docker images for image and document transformation:

• alfresco/alfresco-imagemagick
• alfresco/alfresco-libreoffice
• alfresco/alfresco-pdf-renderer
• alfresco/alfresco-tika
• alfresco/alfresco-transform-misc
• alfresco/alfresco-transform-core-aio

The source code to build these Docker Images is available in https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-transform-core

Additionally sample Docker Compose templates to deploy ACS Community is available in https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-deployment/tree/master/docs/docker-compose

Since these Docker Compose templates don't include some real world features, like persistent storage or modules deployment, a Yeoman Generator is provided in order to configure your deployment: https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-docker-installer.

Alfresco Docker Installer

This project, available in https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-docker-installer, generates a Docker Compose template ready to be used including following features:

• RAM limits for every service according to global memory available for Docker
• PostgreSQL or MariaDB as database (no other option but MySQL is supported for Community)
• Search Services configured for environments using several languages for contents or from operative systems / browsers
• Outbound Email service (smtp)
• LDAP service for identification (based in OpenLDAP)
• Several addons available

This program requires Node.js and Yeoman Generator.

Installing Alfresco in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In order to use Alfresco Docker Installer on an Ubuntu server, some dependencies need to be installed.

Let's start updating the packages in your Ubuntu server.

$ sudo apt update

Install Docker using default instructions from https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/

$ sudo apt-get install \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg-agent \
    software-properties-common

$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

$ sudo add-apt-repository \
   "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
   $(lsb_release -cs) \
   stable"

$ sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

$ sudo docker -v
Docker version 20.10.0, build 7287ab3

Also Docker Compose is required, so follow default instructions from https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/

$ sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.27.4/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

$ sudo docker-compose -v
docker-compose version 1.27.4, build 40524192

Node.js is required to run the Alfresco Docker Installer, despite it's not required to run Alfresco with Docker Compose. Install this program using the following commands.

$ sudo apt install nodejs

$ sudo apt install npm

And finally, Alfresco Docker Installer dependencies should be installed.

$ sudo npm install -g yo

$ sudo npm install --global generator-alfresco-docker-installer

From this point, every dependency is installed in your Ubuntu server, so we can create a new Docker Compose template to deploy Alfresco Community.

$ yo alfresco-docker-installer

? Which ACS version do you want to use? 6.2
? How may GB RAM are available for Alfresco (8 is minimum required)? 12
? Do you want to use HTTPs for Web Proxy? No
? What is the name of your server? server.com
? What HTTP port do you want to use (all the services are using the same port)? 80
? Do you want to use FTP (port 2121)? No
? Do you want to use MariaDB instead of PostgreSQL? No
? Are you using different languages (this is the most common scenario)? Yes
? Do you want to create an internal SMTP server? No
? Do you want to create an internal LDAP server? No
? Select the addons to be installed:
? Are you using a Windows host to run Docker? No
? Do you want to use a start script? No
   create .env
   create docker-compose.yml
   create alfresco/Dockerfile
   create alfresco/modules/amps/empty
   create alfresco/modules/jars/empty
   create share/Dockerfile
   create share/web-extension/share-config-custom-dev.xml
   create share/modules/amps/empty
   create share/modules/jars/empty
   create search/Dockerfile
   create config/nginx.htpasswd

Remember to use the real server name for your Ubuntu server ("server.com" is used in the sample above).

As we are installing in Linux, some permission changes need to be done to Docker mounted volumes. Details for this operation are available in https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-docker-installer#docker-volumes

$ mkdir -p data/solr-data
$ sudo chown -R 33007 data/solr-data

$ mkdir -p logs/postgres
$ sudo chown -R 999 logs/postgres

From this point, Docker Compose is ready to be started.

$ sudo docker-compose up --build --force-recreate

...
alfresco_1               | 17-Dec-2020 10:21:11.697 INFO [main] org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start Server startup in 133849 ms

Once everything is up & ready, following URLs should be available (with admin/admin credentials by default):

• http://server.com/alfresco
• http://server.com/share
• http://server.com/

Live Demo

Video recording related with this Docker Compose deployment in Ubuntu is available in: