Docker Compose and build files used to host my personal phpBB forum, which is hosted at https://forum.flitpix.net.
This does not include any assets not owned by me, or anything containing any credentials.
The host system must have the following software installed to proceed:
All instructions here assume that...
- You are on a Linux server, though the Docker Compose should work fine on a Windows server with Docker as well.
- You are familiar with Docker Engine and Docker Compose.
- You are familiar with the basics of hosting a website using Apache httpd.
Clone this repository.
Create db_password.txt (phpBB database secret) and db_root_password.txt (root database secret), and set the respective passwords.
Create build/forum/phpbb-install.yml, and configure it according to your needs.
Set up Traefik according to your needs. Traefik-specific documentation is not included in this repository, but some labels are.
Ensure you're in the same directory as docker-compose.yml, then run the Docker Compose script to start the containers:
docker-compose up -d
Building the forum container may take some time.
Install phpBB using the phpBB CLI (any phpBB Debug errors can be safely ignored):
docker exec -it --user www-data forum php /var/www/html/board/install/phpbbcli.php install /var/www/html/board/phpbb-install.yml
docker exec -it forum rm -r /var/www/html/board/install/ /var/www/html/board/docs/ phpbb-install.yml
The first command installs phpBB.
The second command deletes the install/ and docs/ directories, as well as phpbb-install.yml.
install/ must be deleted to complete setup.
It is highly recommended to delete phpbb-install.yml, as it may contain your admin user password if set.
If you aren't sure about any of this, just run the above commands.
You can now go to https://domain.tld/board (or http://ipaddress/board) to access phpBB!
Sign into the admin account, go into the ACP, and set up your extensions, styles, users, groups, and forums.
To learn how, see phpBB's
User Guide and
Knowledge Base.
This can also be used locally to develop and test extensions and styles for phpBB. I highly encourage this!
After installing your board, you may later find additional extensions and/or styles you might want to install.
To download them, use curl -fSL <url> -o <filename>.zip,
where <url> is the URL copied from the green download button on the phpbb.com extension page
(here's an example).
Then, unzip it, and
copy the resulting directory into the Docker container.
Extensions go into /var/www/html/board/ext/, while styles go into /var/www/html/board/styles/.
If you have issues afterwards, you may then need to go into the Docker container with docker exec -it apforum bash,
and use chown -R www-data:www-data <directory> on the ext and/or styles directories.
Past that, it might be a problem with the extension and you'll need to do independent troubleshooting from there.
Consider using Manticore as your search backend instead of native or database fulltext, as it scales better on larger boards. It's a drop-in replacement for Sphinx; the former is open source and still maintained, while the latter is closed-source and no longer maintained, so the choice is fairly obvious imo.
Currently-untested, yet promising setup instructions can be found here. Adjust them for your setup.
I use Traefik as my reverse proxy as it is very simple to set up and use,
and this is somewhat reflected in docker-compose.yml.
This should also work with other reverse proxies, like nginx.
If you continue with using a reverse proxy, and you configure it to use SSL (you should), the Browser Push Notifications extension will complain about the server not being configured for SSL. You can safely ignore this, it will allow you to continue and will work.