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Migrating to the new Pixelfed Docker setup
There is a lot of changes in how Pixelfed Docker/Docker Compose images work - it's a complete rewrite - with a bunch of breaking changes.
No more anonymous Docker Compose volumes
The old docker-compose.yml
configuration file declared four anonymous volumes for storing Pixelfed related data within.
These are no longer used, instead favoring a Docker bind volume approach where content are stored directly on the server disk, outside of a Docker volume.
The consequence of this change is that all data stored in the - now unsupported - Docker volumes will no longer be accessible by Pixelfed.
- The
db-data
volume definitely contain important data - it's your database after all! - The
app-storage
volume definitely contain important data - it's files uploaded to - or seen by - your server! - The
redis-data
volume might contain important data (depending on your configuration) - The
app-bootstrap
volume does not contain any important data - all of it will be generated automatically in the new setup on startup. We will not be migrating this!
Migrating off anonymous Docker Compose volumes
Caveats and warnings
[!NOTE] This is a best-effort guide to help migrate off the old system, the operation is potentially rather complicated (and risky), so please do be careful!
[!CAUTION] PLEASE MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR SERVER AND DATA BEFORE ATTEMPTING A MIGRATION
We provide a "migration container" for your convenience that can access both the new and old volumes, allowing you to copy the data into the setup.
[!CAUTION] It's important to note that this is a copy operation - so disk usage will (temporarily) double while you migrate
YOUR INSTANCE WILL BE DOWN WHILE DOING THE MIGRATION, PLEASE PLAN ACCORDINGLY, DEPENDING ON DATA SIZE IT COULD TAKE ANYWHERE FROM 5 MINUTES TO 5 HOURS
0. Backup, rollout, and rollback plan
- Make sure to backup your server (ideally after step 1 below has completed, but before is better than not at all!)
- Capture the current Git version / Pixelfed release you are on (e.g.
git --no-pager log -1
outputs the commit reference as the 2nd word in first line) - Backup your
.env
file (we will do this in step 3 as well) - Backup your
docker-compose.yml
file (cp docker-compose.yml docker-compose.yml.old
) - Read through the entire document before starting
1. Migrate your ".env" file
The new .env
file for Docker is a bit different from the old one (many new settings!) so the easiest is to grab the new .env.docker
file and modify it from scratch again.
$ cp .env .env.old
$ wget -O .env.new https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/dev/.env.docker
Then open your old .env.old
configuration file, and for each of the key/value pairs within it, find and update the key in the new .env.new
configuration file.
Don't worry though, the file might look different (and significantly larger) but it behaves exactly the way the old file did, it just has way more options!
If a key is missing in .env.new
, don't worry, you can just add those key/value pairs back to the new file - ideally in the Other configuration
section near the end of the file - but anywhere should be fine.
This is a great time to review your settings and familiarize you with all the new settings.
In particular the following sections
PHP configuration
section (near the end of the file) where- The
PHP_VERSION
settings controls your PHP version - The
PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT
settings controls your PHP memory limit
- The
Docker Specific configuration
section (near the end of the file) where- The
DOCKER_ALL_HOST_DATA_ROOT_PATH
setting dictate where the new migrated data will live. - The
DOCKER_APP_RUN_ONE_TIME_SETUP_TASKS
controls if theOne time setup tasks
should run or not. We do not want this, since your Pixelfed instance already is set up!
- The
- Frequently Asked Question / FAQ
2. Stop all running containers
Stop all running containers (web, worker, redis, db)
$ docker compose down
3. Pull down the new source code
Update your project to the latest release of Pixelfed by running
$ git pull origin $release
Where $release
is either dev
, staging
or a tagged release such as v0.12.0
.
4. Run the migration container
You can access the Docker container with both old and new volumes by running the following command
$ docker compose -f docker-compose.migrate.yml run migrate bash
This will put you in the /migrate
directory within the container, containing 8 directories like shown here
|-- app-storage
| |-- new
| `-- old
|-- db-data
| |-- new
| `-- old
`-- redis-data
|-- new
`-- old
5. Check the folders
Old folders
The following commands should all return SOME files and data - if they do not - then there might be an issue with the anonymous volume binding.
$ ls app-storage/old
$ ls db-data/old
$ ls redis-data/old
New folders
The following commands should all return NO files and data - if they contain data - you need to either delete it (backup first!) or skip that migration step.
If you haven't run docker compose up
since you updated your project in step (2) - they should be empty and good to go.
$ ls app-storage/new
$ ls db-data/new
$ ls redis-data/new
6. Copy the data
Now we will copy the data from the old volumes, to the new ones.
The migration container has rsync
installed - which is perfect for that kind of work!
NOTE It's important that the "source" (first path in the rsync
command) has a trailing /
- otherwise the directory layout will turn out wrong!
NOTE Depending on your server, these commands might take some time to finish, each command should provide a progress bar with rough time estimation.
NOTE rsync
should preserve ownership, permissions, and symlinks correctly for you as well for all the files copied.
Lets copy the data by running the following commands:
$ rsync -avP app-storage/old/ app-storage/new
$ rsync -avP db-data/old/ db-data/new
$ rsync -avP redis-data/old/ redis-data/new
7. Sanity checking
Lets make sure everything copied over successfully!
Each new directory should contain something like (but not always exactly) the following - NO directory should have a single folder called old
, if they do, the rsync
commands above didn't work correctly - and you need to move the content of the old
folder into the "root" of the new
folder like shown a bit in the following sections.
The redis-data/new directory might also contain a server.pid
$ ls redis-data/new
appendonlydir
The app-storage/new directory should look something like this
$ ls app-storage/new
app debugbar docker framework logs oauth-private.key oauth-public.key purify
The db-data/new directory should look something like this. There might be a lot of files, or very few files, but there must be a mysql
, performance_schema
, and ${DB_DATABASE}
(e.g. pixelfed_prod
directory)
$ ls db-data/new
aria_log_control ddl_recovery-backup.log ib_buffer_pool ib_logfile0 ibdata1 mariadb_upgrade_info multi-master.info mysql performance_schema pixelfed_prod sys undo001 undo002 undo003
If everything looks good, type exit
to leave exit the migration container
6. Starting up the your Pixelfed server again
With all an updated Pixelfed (step 2), updated .env
file (step 3), migrated data (step 4, 5, 6 and 7) we're ready to start things back up again.
But before we start your Pixelfed server back up again, lets put the new .env
file we made in step 1 in its right place.
$ cp .env.new .env
The Database
First thing we want to try is to start up the database by running the following command and checking the logs
$ docker compose up -d db
$ docker compose logs --tail 250 --follow db
if there are no errors and the server isn't crashing, great! If you have an easy way of connecting to the Database via a GUI or CLI client, do that as well and verify the database and tables are all there.
Redis
Next thing we want to try is to start up the Redis server by running the following command and checking the logs
$ docker compose up -d redis
$ docker compose logs --tail 250 --follow redis
if there are no errors and the server isn't crashing, great!
Worker
Next thing we want to try is to start up the Worker server by running the following command and checking the logs
$ docker compose up -d worker
$ docker compose logs --tail 250 --follow worker
The container should output a lot of logs from the docker-entrypoint system, but eventually you should see these messages
Configuration complete; ready for start up
Horizon started successfully.
If you see one or both of those messages, great, the worker seems to be running.
If the worker is crash looping, inspect the logs and try to resolve the issues.
You can consider the following additional steps:
- Enabling
DOCKER_APP_ENTRYPOINT_DEBUG
which will show even more log output to help understand whats going on - Enabling
DOCKER_APP_ENSURE_OWNERSHIP_PATHS
against the path(s) that might have permission issues - Fixing permission issues directly on the host since your data should all be in the
${DOCKER_ALL_HOST_DATA_ROOT_PATH}
folder (./docker-compose-state/data
by default)
Web
The final service, web
, which will bring your site back online! What a journey it has been.
Lets get to it, run these commands to start the web
service and inspect the logs.
$ docker compose up -d web
$ docker compose logs --tail 250 --follow web
The output should be pretty much identical to that of the worker
, so please see that section for debugging tips if the container is crash looping.
If the web
service came online without issues, start the rest of the (optional) services, such as the proxy
, if enabled, by running
$ docker compose up -d
$ docker compose logs --tail 250 --follow
If you changed anything in the .env
file while debugging, some containers might restart now, thats perfectly fine.
7. Verify
With all services online, it's time to go to your browser and check everything is working
- Upload and post a picture
- Comment on a post
- Like a post
- Check Horizon (
https://${APP_DOMAIN}/horizon
) for any errors - Check the Docker compose logs via
docker compose logs --follow
If everything looks fine, yay, you made it to the end! Lets do some cleanup
8. Final steps + cleanup
With everything working, please take a new snapshot/backup of your server before we do any cleanup. A post-migration snapshot is incredibly useful, since it contains both the old and new configuration + data, making any recovery much easier in a rollback scenario later.
Now, with all the data in the new folders, you can delete the old Docker Container volumes (if you want, completely optional)
List all volumes, and give them a look:
$ docker volume ls
The volumes we want to delete ends with the volume name (db-data
, app-storage
, redis-data
, and app-bootstrap
.) but has some prefix in front of them.
Once you have found the volumes in in the list, delete each of them by running:
$ docker volume rm $volume_name_in_column_two_of_the_output
You can also delete the docker-compose.yml.old
and .env.old
file since they are no longer needed
$ rm docker-compose.yml.old
$ rm .env.old
Rollback
Oh no, something went wrong? No worries, we you got backups and a quick way back!
Move docker-compose.yml
back
$ cp docker-compose.yml docker-compose.yml.new
$ cp docker-compose.yml.old docker-compose.yml
Move .env
file back
$ cp env.old .env
Go back to old source code version
$ git checkout $commit_id_from_step_0
Start things back up
docker compose up -d