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Installation from Docker

Docker 17.06.2+ and Docker Compose 1.14.0+ are required to perform installation via Docker. This is the recommended way to deploy the application when used in production.

Available as coralproject/talk on Docker Hub. (latest/Dockerfile)

Images are tagged using the following notation:

  • x (where x is the major version number): any minor or patch updates will be included in this. If you’re ok getting new features occasionally and all the bug fixes, this is the tag for you. Any changes to this image tag will not require a database migration.
  • x.y (where y is the minor version number): any patch updates will be included with this tag. If you like getting fixes and having features change only when you want, this is the tag for you. (recommended)
  • x.y.z (where z is the patch version): this tag never gets updated, and essentially freezes your version, this should only be used when you are either extending Talk or are sure of a specific version you want to freeze.

We provide tags with *-onbuild (onbuild/Dockerfile) that can be used for easy plugin integration and acts as a customization endpoint. To use this image tag, refer to the onbuild section.

Installing

To use Talk without major customization you can run the application using our provided docker image. The following is a docker-compose.yml file that can be used to setup Talk:

# For details on the syntax of docker-compose.yml files, check out:
# https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v2/

version: '2'
services:
  talk:
    image: coralproject/talk:4
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    depends_on:
      - mongo
      - redis
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=development # remove this line in production
      - TALK_MONGO_URL=mongodb://mongo/talk
      - TALK_REDIS_URL=redis://redis
      - TALK_ROOT_URL=http://127.0.0.1:3000
      - TALK_PORT=3000
      - TALK_JWT_SECRET=password
  mongo:
    image: mongo:latest
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - mongo:/data/db
  redis:
    image: redis:latest
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - redis:/data
volumes:
  mongo:
    external: false
  redis:
    external: false

This is the bare minimum needed to start Talk, for more configuration variables, check out the Configuration section.

And you can then start it with:

docker-compose up -d

This process will take a minute or two, it has to download docker images for the required databases and Talk as well as setup the environments.

Now that you’ve started the services started using compose, you should see output that resembles the following:

Creating mongo_1 ...
Creating redis_1 ...
Creating mongo_1 ... done
Creating redis_1 ... done
Creating talk_1 ...
Creating talk_1 ... done

And when you run docker-compose ps, you should see something like:

    Name                   Command               State           Ports
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mongo_1   docker-entrypoint.sh mongod      Up      27017/tcp
redis_1   docker-entrypoint.sh redis ...   Up      6379/tcp
talk_1    yarn start                       Up      0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp

At this stage, you should refer to the configuration for configuration variables that are specific to your installation.

Onbuild

We provide *-onbuild images to assist and automate the customization of our base installation with additional custom plugins. Images can be created with the most basic of Dockerfile‘s:

FROM coralproject/talk:4-onbuild

And running the following to build the docker image:

docker build -t my-awesome-talk-image --build-arg TALK_DEFAULT_LANG=es .

Don’t forget to replace my-awesome-talk-image with your own image name, and specify your build variables with the --build-arg. Refer to Dockerfile.onbuild for the available build variables.

This accomplishes a lot:

  1. Copies all the files alongside the Dockerfile into the application directory in the Docker image.
  2. Installs any new dependencies that were required by any new plugins.
  3. Builds the new static bundles so that they are ready to serve when the image is running.
  4. Specifies a build time variable TALK_DEFAULT_LANG. Refer to Dockerfile.onbuild for the available build variables.

This means that you can create a repository for your organization that simply includes the above Dockerfile, a directory of plugins, and a plugins.json file which specifies the activated plugins, and you can deploy Talk easily to your containerized infrastructure. The versioning of our Docker tags as well lets you do something like:

FROM coralproject/talk:4-onbuild

Which would pin your image to `4.x.x release’s.