Installing and Configuring Atlassian Confluence with MySQL in Docker Containers

Atlassian Confluence is already available as a Docker Image from the Docker Hub but you still need to provide a database instance for a production setup. Let’s build a docker-compose file to create a container from this image together with a container running MySQL.

First,  per the docs on the Docker Hub page, create an external folder /data/confluence that will get mounted as a volume by the Container.

This is my first version to get this working (keep reading for refining this to include a JDBC driver)

[code]

version: ‘3’
services:
confluence:
image: atlassian/confluence-server
restart: always
volumes:
– /data/confluence:/var/atlassian/application-data/confluence
ports:
– 8090:8090
– 8091:8091
confl-mysql:
build: ./mysql
restart: always
environment:
– MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD=yes
– MYSQL_DATABASE=confluence
– MYSQL_USER=confluence
– MYSQL_PASSWORD=your-password
[/code]

After hitting your-ip:8090 for the first time, you can pick the ‘My own database’ option:

To connect to a MySQL db you need to drop a MySQL JDBC driver into /opt/atlassian/confluence/confluence/WEB-INF/lib so at this point we’ve got a couple of options. We could either copy the JDBC driver into the container (but since containers are ephemeral we’d lose this change if we started a new container from the image), or take a step back and rebuild the image including the driver:

The right thing to do would be to rebuild a custom image including the driver. So let’s do that.

Download the MySQL Connector driver from here.

Let’s commit it into our project and add a new Dockerfile to build a modified version of the official Confluence image, which is simply just these two lines:

[code]

FROM atlassian/confluence-server
COPY mysql-connector-java-5.1.46.jar /opt/atlassian/confluence/confluence/WEB-INF/lib

[/code]

Update the docker-compose file to build this new image instead of using the provided one from Docker Hub. Replace:

[code]

image: atlassian/confluence-server

[/code]

with

[code]

build: ./confl-mysql

[/code]

(or your corresponding name of your custom image containing the above Dockerfile)

Now when we startup this container and hit the app, the JDBC driver was recognized and we’re on to the next config page for our database connection params:

Entering our credentials and pressing Test, we’ve got an error about the default encoding:

To address this, the Confluence setup docs here describe editing the my.cnf file in MySQL, or alternatively I could pass params. The MySQL docs have a chapter on configuring and running MySQL in Docker, and this Q&A on Stackoverflow describes passing the optional params in a command section in your docker-compose file.

My first attempt was to add this:

[code]

confl-mysql:
build: ./mysql
restart: always
command: character-set-server=utf8 collation-server=utf8_bin
[/code]

but the syntax was not quite right yet, resulting in the container startup in a restart loop, and this error appearing in the container logs:

/usr/local/bin/docker-entrypoint.sh: line 202: exec: character-set-server=utf8: not found

Reading docs for the command option, the command in the docker-compose file needs to be the command to start the app in the container as well as the optional params. So now I’m here:

[code]

confl-mysql:
build: ./mysql
restart: always
command: [mysqld, –character-set-server=utf8 –collation-server=utf8_bin]
[/code]

Now we’re getting closer. Logs from my MySQL container and how showing:

ERROR: mysqld failed while attempting to check config

command was: "mysqld --character-set-server=utf8 --collation-server=utf8_bin --verbose --help"

mysqld: Character set 'utf8 --collation-server=utf8_bin' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the '/usr/share/mysql/charsets/Index.xml' file

Some Googling made me realize each of the params is command separated,  so next update is:

[code]
confl-mysql:
build: ./mysql
restart: always
command: [mysqld, –character-set-server=utf8, –collation-server=utf8_bin]
[/code]

and now we’ve got both containers starting up. The list of params should be updated to add all the optional params listed in the Confluence MySQL set up docs, otherwise you’ll get an error for each missing param. The complete list is:

command: [mysqld, --character-set-server=utf8, --collation-server=utf8_bin, --default-storage-engine=INNODB, --max_allowed_packet=256M, --innodb_log_file_size=2GB, --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED, --binlog_format=row]

… and my VM has run out of diskspace, so time to expand my disk. Back shortly.

Ok, back. Restarted and now we’re in business:

Complete config and now the containers are up!

4 Replies to “Installing and Configuring Atlassian Confluence with MySQL in Docker Containers”

  1. How did you get the confluence and mysql container to share the database? You don’t show a dockerfile or any mention of mounting the /data/confluence directory on the mysql container.

    When I try adding these lines to the mysql service in my docker-compose, I get an error on confluence setup saying it can’t write the the ‘home’ directory.

    volumes:
    – /data/confluence:/var/lib/mysql

    Thanks for the write-up! Sorry if it’s a newbie question, but… I’m a newbie.

        1. Thanks for the link to your solution. The key as I think you found out was not that you need to mount a shared folder between the two, but as far as I can remember as this is several months back when I looked at this, because the docker-compose defines services by name, each service in the same docker-compose file can by default see each other by the same names too.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.