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BookStack in Docker

BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.

A friendly middle ground between heavyweights like MediaWiki or Confluence and Gollum, BookStack relies on a database backend (so searching and versioning is easy), but limits itself to a pre-defined, 3-tier structure (book, chapter, page). The result is a lightweight, approachable personal documentation stack, which includes search and Markdown editing.

BookStack Screenshot

I like to protect my public-facing web UIs with an oauth_proxy, ensuring that if an application bug (or a user misconfiguration) exposes the app to unplanned public scrutiny, I have a second layer of defense.

BookStack Requirements

Ingredients

Already deployed:

Related:

Preparation

Setup data locations

We'll need several directories to bind-mount into our container, so create them in /var/data/bookstack:

mkdir -p /var/data/bookstack/database-dump
mkdir -p /var/data/runtime/bookstack/db

Prepare BookStack environment

Create bookstack.env, and populate with the following variables. Set the oauth_proxy variables provided by your OAuth provider (if applicable.)

# For oauth-proxy (optional)
OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_ID=
OAUTH2_PROXY_CLIENT_SECRET=
OAUTH2_PROXY_COOKIE_SECRET=

# For MariaDB/MySQL database
MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD=true
MYSQL_DATABASE=bookstack
MYSQL_USER=bookstack
MYSQL_PASSWORD=secret

# Bookstack-specific variables
DB_HOST=bookstack_db:3306
DB_DATABASE=bookstack
DB_USERNAME=bookstack
DB_PASSWORD=secret

BookStack Docker Swarm config

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like the example below:

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version: '3'

services:

  db:
    image: mariadb:10
    env_file: /var/data/config/bookstack/bookstack.env
    networks:
      - internal
    volumes:
      - /var/data/runtime/bookstack/db:/var/lib/mysql

  app:
    image: solidnerd/bookstack
    env_file: /var/data/config/bookstack/bookstack.env
    networks:
      - internal
      - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik common
        - traefik.enable=true
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public

        # traefikv1
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:bookstack.example.com
        - traefik.port=4180     

        # traefikv2
        - "traefik.http.routers.bookstack.rule=Host(`bookstack.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.services.bookstack.loadbalancer.server.port=4180"
        - "traefik.enable=true"

        # Remove if you wish to access the URL directly
        - "traefik.http.routers.bookstack.middlewares=forward-auth@file"

  db-backup:
    image: mariadb:10
    env_file: /var/data/config/bookstack/bookstack.env
    volumes:
      - /var/data/bookstack/database-dump:/dump
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    entrypoint: |
      bash -c 'bash -s <<EOF
      trap "break;exit" SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
      sleep 2m
      while /bin/true; do
        mysqldump -h db --all-databases | gzip -c > /dump/dump_\`date +%d-%m-%Y"_"%H_%M_%S\`.sql.gz
        (ls -t /dump/dump*.sql.gz|head -n $$BACKUP_NUM_KEEP;ls /dump/dump*.sql.gz)|sort|uniq -u|xargs rm -- {}
        sleep $$BACKUP_FREQUENCY
      done
      EOF'
    networks:
    - internal

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true
  internal:
    driver: overlay
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: 172.16.33.0/24

Note

Setup unique static subnets for every stack you deploy. This avoids IP/gateway conflicts which can otherwise occur when you're creating/removing stacks a lot. See my list here.

Serving

Launch Bookstack stack

Launch the BookStack stack by running docker stack deploy bookstack -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

Log into your new instance at https://YOUR-FQDN, authenticate with oauth_proxy, and then login with username 'admin@admin.com' and password 'password'.

Chef's notes 📓

  1. If you wanted to expose the Bookstack UI directly, you could remove the traefik-forward-auth from the design. ↩

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