docker-cartodb

This Docker container image provides a fully working cartodb development solution without the installation hassle.

Just run the commands and then connect to http://cartodb.localhost with your browser.

The default login is dev/pass1234. You may want to change it when you run it for the outside.

It also creates an 'example' organization with owner login admin4example/pass1234. Organization members can be created on http://cartodb.localhost/user/admin4example/organization

How to run the container:

docker run -d -p 80:80 -h cartodb.localhost sverhoeven/cartodb

The CartoDB instance has been configured with the hostname cartodb.localhost, this means the web browser and web server need to be able to resolve cartodb.localhost to an IP adress of the machine where the web server is running. This can be done by adding cartodb.localhost alias to your hosts file. For example

sudo sh -c 'echo 127.0.1.1 cartodb.localhost >> /etc/hosts'

(For Windows it will be C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)

How to use a different hostname:

For example to use cartodb.example.com as a hostname start with:

docker run -d -p 80:80 -h cartodb.example.com sverhoeven/cartodb

The chosen hostname should also resolve to an IP adress of the machine where the web server is running.

If you don't have a domain/subdomain pointing to your server yet, you can use the servers external ip address:

docker run -d -p 80:80 -h <servers-external-ip-address> sverhoeven/cartodb

Instead of setting hostname with -h you can also use the CARTO_HOSTNAME environment variable with:

docker run -d -p 80:80 -e CARTO_HOSTNAME=<hostname> sverhoeven/cartodb

HTTPS encryption

By default the Docker container runs unencrypted on port 80 and redirects to itself on port 80.

There are 2 ways to enable https encryption:

1. Use loadbalancer or reverse proxy to map https to http
2. Use embedded NGINX web server to perform encryption with automatic Let's encrypt certificate deployment.

1. With load balancer or reverse proxy

Run container with

docker run -d -p 80:80 -e CARTO_HOSTNAME=<hostname> -e HTTPS=1 sverhoeven/cartodb

Configure load balancer or reverse proxy to accept traffic on https://:443 and forward it to port 80 of the Docker container.

2. With automatic deployment

Run container with

docker run -d -p 443:443 -e CARTO_HOSTNAME=<hostname> -e HTTPS=1 -e LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=<email adress> sverhoeven/cartodb

The <email adress> is used by Certbot as the account to register the domain at Let's Encrypt.

Let's encrypt has a rate limit of a few generated certificates per domain per month, so you cannot just generate new certificates every time the container is restarted. So you should keep the generated certificates by mounting /etc/letsencrypt.

A cron job will try to renew the certificate each week.

Persistent data

To persist the PostgreSQL data, the PostGreSQL data dir (/var/lib/postgresql) must be persisted outside the Cartodb Docker container.

The PostgreSQL data dir is filled during the building of this Docker image and must be copied to the local filesystem and then the container must be started with the local copy volume mounted.

docker create --name cartodb_pgdata sverhoeven/cartodb
# Change to directory to save the Postgresql data dir (cartodb_pgdata) of the CartoDB image
docker cp cartodb_pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql $PWD/cartodb_pgdata
docker rm -f cartodb_pgdata

After this the CartoDB container will have a database that stays filled after restarts. The CartoDB container can be started with

docker run -d -p 80:80 -h cartodb.example.com -v $PWD/cartodb_pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql sverhoeven/cartodb

Geocoder

The external geocoders like heremaps, mapbox, mapzen or tomtom have dummy api keys and do not work. No attempts have been made or will be made in this Docker image to get the external geocoders to work.

The internal geocoder is configured, but contains no data inside the image.

To fill the internal geocoder run

docker exec -ti <carto docker container id> bash -c /cartodb/script/fill_geocoder.sh

This will run the scripts described at https://github.com/CartoDB/data-services/tree/master/geocoder It will use at least 5.7+7.8Gb of diskspace to download the dumps and import them.

How to build the image:

The image can be build with

git clone https://github.com/sverhoeven/docker-cartodb.git
docker build -t=sverhoeven/cartodb docker-cartodb/

The build uses the master branches of the CartoDB GitHub repositories. A fresh build may fail when code requires newer dependencies then the Dockerfile provides or when code is not stable at the moment of building.