How To Prepare Docker Training Instance

Note

we chose Docker over other many ways of installing DHIS2 because in a few minutes you can have your instance up and running

Installing Docker on the host server

Please refer to this link for installing Docker

Installling Docker Compose

  • To install Docker Compose, please refer to the official Docker Compose site here
  • To prepare the training instance, we used two images:
    • dhis2 core 2.33
    • dmillon/postgis (recommended because it already has postgis which DHIS2 depends on to render maps)

Downloading the images

```
paste contents of docker-compose.yml

```

you can change to whichever image you want to use. But please remember to drop SQL views before creating your dump

You can go ahead and read this to prepare your instance. Within a few minutes you should by now have your DHIS2 instance running.

Warning

use postgres as your user for the db. It poses security threats (yes) but it's easier to deal with PostgreSQL with that setup. Unless ofcourse you're a PostgreSQL ninja.

Restoring Postgres Database

As you saw from the previous step, your instance is running two containers with networking between them handled by Docker Compose. If you have a live connection to Postgres database, you can't drop and restore your db.

  • Do docker ps to see all of the running containers. docker-compose ps also works fine.
    • it's important to do this step first because docker-compose is going to name according to how you named the folder containing the docker-compose.yml as well as how you labeled them inside the file
  • To do that, you have to kill the frontend DHIS2 container then restore the DB with docker container kill <name_of_dhis_container>
  • Copy DB backup file into Postgres container with docker cp dhis_db_backup.sql <name_of_postgres_container>:/
  • Get into the container with docker exec -it <name_of_postgres_container> bash
  • Switch account from root to postgres with su postgres and then launch the PostgreSQL interactive terminal with psql
  • \l to list all of the databases
  • drop database dhis2; to delete the database
  • create database dhis2 to recreate the database. But now it's empty
  • \q to the interactive terminal
  • psql --username=postgres --dbname=dhis2 < dhis_db_backup.sql to restore all of data into the empty database. if the command ran succefully, you should see a trail of verbosely listed SQL commands processed
  • Then the trail is done, do exit to exit the container
  • Finally, start the container that we "killed" with docker container start <name_of_dhis_container>
Last update: July 27, 2020