What is XWiki

XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. XWiki is an enterprise wiki. It includes WYSIWYG editing, OpenDocument based document import/export, semantic annotations and tagging, and advanced permissions management.

As an application wiki, XWiki allows for the storing of structured data and the execution of server side script within the wiki interface. Scripting languages including Velocity, Groovy, Python, Ruby and PHP can be written directly into wiki pages using wiki macros. User-created data structures can be defined in wiki documents and instances of those structures can be attached to wiki documents, stored in a database, and queried using either Hibernate query language or XWiki's own query language.

XWiki.org's extension wiki is home to XWiki extensions ranging from code snippets which can be pasted into wiki pages to loadable core modules. Many of XWiki Enterprise's features are provided by extensions which are bundled with it.

Introduction

The goal is to provide a production-ready XWiki system running in Docker. This is why:

• The OS is based on Debian and not on some smaller-footprint distribution like Alpine
• Several containers are used with Docker Compose: one for the DB and another for XWiki + Servlet container. This allows the ability to run them on different machines for example.

How to use this image

You should first install Docker on your machine.

Then there are several options:

1. Pull the xwiki image from DockerHub.
2. Get the sources of this project and build them.

Pulling existing image

You need to run 2 containers:

• One for the XWiki image
• One for the database image to which XWiki connects to

Using docker run

Start by creating a dedicated docker network

docker network create -d bridge xwiki-nw 

Then run a MySQL container and ensure you configure MySQL to use UTF8. The command below will also configure the MySQL container to save its data on your localhost in a /my/own/mysql directory:

docker run --net=xwiki-nw --name mysql-xwiki -v /my/own/mysql:/var/lib/mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=xwiki -e MYSQL_USER=xwiki -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=xwiki -e MYSQL_DATABASE=xwiki -d mysql:5.7 --character-set-server=utf8 --collation-server=utf8_bin --explicit-defaults-for-timestamp=1 

You should adapt the command line to use the passwords that you wish for the MySQL root password and for the xwiki user password.

Then run XWiki in another container by issuing the following command:

docker run --net=xwiki-nw --name xwiki -p 8080:8080 -v /my/own/xwiki:/usr/local/xwiki -e MYSQL_USER=xwiki -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=xwiki -e MYSQL_DATABASE=xwiki -e DB_CONTAINER_NAME=mysql-xwiki xwiki:mysql-tomcat

Be careful to use the same MySQL username, password and database names that you've used on the first command to start the MySQL container. Also, please don't forget to add a '-e DB_CONTAINER_NAME=' env variable with the name of the previously created MySQL container so that XWiki knows where its database is.

At this point, XWiki should start in interactive mode. Should you wish to run it in "detached mode", just add a "-d" flag in the previous command.

docker run -d --net=xwiki-nw ...

Using docker-compose

Another solution is to use the Docker Compose file we provide. Run the following steps:

• wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki/master/xwiki-mysql-tomcat/mysql/xwiki.cnf: This will download the MySQL configuration (UTF8, etc)
  • If you don't have wget or prefer to use curl: curl -fSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki/master/xwiki-mysql-tomcat/mysql/xwiki.cnf -o xwiki.cnf
  • If you're not using the latest tag then use the corresponding GitHub branch/tag. For example for the 8.x branch: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki/8.x/xwiki-mysql-tomcat/mysql/xwiki.cnf
• wget -O docker-compose.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki/master/xwiki-mysql-tomcat/docker-compose-using.yml
  • If you don't have wget or prefer to use curl: curl -fSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki/master/xwiki-mysql-tomcat/docker-compose-using.yml -o docker-compose.yml
  • If you're not using the latest tag then use the corresponding GitHub branch/tag. For example for the 8.x branch: wget -O docker-compose.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki/8.x/xwiki-mysql-tomcat/docker-compose-using.yml
• You can edit the compose file retrieved to change the default username/password and other environment variables.
• docker-compose up

For reference here's a minimal Docker Compose file using MySQL that you could use as an example (full example here):

version: '2'
services:
  web:
    image: "xwiki:mysql-tomcat"
    depends_on:
      - db
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - MYSQL_USER=xwiki
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=xwiki
    volumes:
      - xwiki-data:/usr/local/xwiki
  db:
    image: "mysql:5.7"
    volumes:
      - ./xwiki.cnf:/etc/mysql/conf.d/xwiki.cnf
      - mysql-data:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=xwiki
      - MYSQL_USER=xwiki
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=xwiki
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=xwiki
volumes:
  mysql-data: {}
  xwiki-data: {}

Building

This allows you to rebuild the XWiki docker image locally. Here are the steps:

• Install Git and run git clone https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/docker-xwiki.git or download the sources from the GitHub UI. Then choose the branch or tag that you wish to use. For example:
  • The masterbranch will get you the latest released version of XWiki
  • The 8.x branch will get you the latest released version of XWiki for the 8.x cycle
  • etc.
• Go the directory corresponding to the configuration you wish to build, for example: cd xwiki-mysql-tomcat.
• Run docker-compose up
• Start a browser and point it to http://localhost:8080

Note that if you want to set a custom version of XWiki you can checkout master and edit the env file and set the values you need in there. It's also possible to override them on the command line with docker-compose run -e "XWIKI_VERSION=8.4.4".

Note that docker-compose up will automatically build the XWiki image on the first run. If you need to rebuild it you can issue docker-compose up --build. You can also build the image with docker build . -t xwiki-mysql-tomcat:latest for example.

Details for xwiki-mysql-tomcat

Configuration Options

The first time you create a container out of the xwiki image, a shell script (/usr/local/bin/start_xwiki.sh) is executed in the container to setup some configuration. The following environment variables can be passed:

• MYSQL_USER: The MySQL user name used by XWiki to read/write to the DB.
• MYSQL_PASSWORD: The MySQL user password used by XWiki to read/write to the DB.

Miscellaneous

Volumes:

If you don't map any volume when using docker run or if you use docker-compose then Docker will create some internal volumes attached to your containers as follows.

• Two volumes are created:

  • A volume named <prefix>_mysql-data that contains the database data.
  • A volume named <prefix>_xwiki-data that contains XWiki's permanent directory.

• To find out where those volumes are located on your local host machine you can inspect them with docker volume inspect <volume name>. To find the volume name, you can list all volumes with docker volume ls.

• Note that on Mac OSX, Docker runs inside the xhyve VM and thus the paths you get when inspecting the volumes are relative to this. Thus, you need to get into that VM if you need to access the volume data.

MySQL:

• To issue some mysql commands:
  • Find the container id with docker ps
  • Execute bash in the mysql container: docker exec -it <containerid> bash -l
  • Once inside the mysql container execute the mysql command: mysql --user=xwiki --password=xwiki

License

XWiki is licensed under the LGPL 2.1.

The Dockerfile repository is also licensed under the LGPL 2.1.

Support

• If you wish to raise an issue or an idea of improvement use XWiki Docker JIRA project
• If you have questions, use the XWiki Users Mailing List/Forum or use the XWiki IRC channel

Contribute

• If you wish to help out on the code, please send Pull Requests on XWiki Docker GitHub project
• Note that changes need to be merged to all other branches where they make sense and if they make sense for existing tags, those tags must be deleted and recreated.
• In addition, whenever a branch or tag is modified, a Pull Request on the DockerHub XWiki official image must be made

Credits

• Created by Vincent Massol
• Contributions from Fabio Mancinelli, Ludovic Dubost, Jean Simard, Denis Germain
• Some code was copied from https://github.com/ThomasSteinbach/docker_xwiki. Thank you Thomas Steinbach