Data¶

Note

There are several ways to store data used by applications that run in Docker containers.

We encourage users of the Plone images to familiarize themselves with the options available.

The Docker documentation is a good starting point for understanding the different storage options and variations.

Data Volumes¶

Let Docker manage the storage of your database data by writing the database files to disk on the host system using its own internal volume management.

The advantages of this approach is that you can deploy your Plone stack anywhere, without having to prepare hosts in advance or care about read/write permission or selinux policy rules.

The downside is that the files may be hard to locate for tools and applications that run directly on the host system, for example outside containers.

Use data volumes with Plone on the command line

docker run --name plone \
     --volume=plone-data:/data \
     -p 8080:8080 \
     plone

Or with Docker Compose

Add docker-compose.yml file

version: "2"
services:
  plone:
    image: plone
    volumes:
    - data:/data
    ports:
    - "8080:8080"

volumes:
  data:

Start the Plone stack

docker-compose up

Host Directories As Data Volumes¶

Create data directories on the host system and mount these to a directory visible from inside the container.

This places the database files in a known location on the host system.

Tools and applications on the host system can access the files.

The downside is that the user needs to make sure that the directory exists, and that for example directory permissions and other security mechanisms on the host system are set up correctly.

Create data directories on a suitable volume on your host system, for example /var/local/data/filestorage and /var/local/data/blobstorage
Start your Plone container

docker run -v /var/local/data/filestorage:/data/filestorage \
      -v /var/local/data/blobstorage:/data/blobstorage \
      -d plone

The -v /path/to/filestorage:/data/filestorage part of the command mounts the -v /path/to/filestorage directory from the underlying host system as /data/filestorage inside the container, where Plone will look for/create the Data.fs database file.

The -v /path/to/blobstorage:/data/blobstorage part of the command mounts the -v /path/to/blobstorage directory from the underlying host system as /data/blobstorage where blobs will be stored.

Make sure that Plone has access to read/write within these folders

chown -R 500:500 /var/local/data

Note

Users on host systems with SELinux enabled may see issues with this.

The current workaround is to assign the relevant SELinux policy type to the new data directory so that the container will be allowed to access it

chcon -Rt svirt_sandbox_file_t /var/local/data