Building Grocy in Docksal

Grocy looks lika a great little PHP stack application for me. It’s aim is to help folks organize and inventory their “stuff”, with a slant toward food and groceries. I need this!

Since I’m also a big fan of Docker and Docksal, naturally I wanted to spin Grocy up in one of these environments. Thankfully, the heavy lifting of getting this “Dockerized” has already been done, and that fine work is shared in GitHub at grocy/grocy-docker. So my quest last evening started with a fork of this GitHub project to SummittDweller/grocy-docker, where I’ve created a new docksal branch.

Dockerizing the Local Stack

I first forked the project using GitHub’s interface, then switched to my personal MacBook and the terminal there, like this:

I should mention that before all of this I edited my MacBook’s /etc/hosts file to make sure I had only one active entry there for 127.0.0.1 localhost. ☑️ Confirmed.

So, I opened my browser to https://localhost as directed in the grocy-docker documentation. 💯 Nice!

The original docker-compose.yml file for this project creates a Docker-managed volume called database and maps that volume to the grocy container’s /www directory, one level above the /www/public webroot. The pertinent lines from docker-compose.yml look like this:

grocy:
  ...
  volumes:
    - database:/www
  ...
volumes:
  database:

That effectively “persists” any changes I make, until I remove them, of course. To test persistence, with the stack still running at https://localhost I entered the default admin user and admin password, navigated to the Master data options and proceeded to add a couple locations to my data.

Next, with the stack still running I made a new host copy of it all, brought the stack down, changed the configuration, then brought it back up again with the new configuration, like so:

While this approach is OK, I wanted something a little more flexible with an accessible, persistent copy of the code and data on my MacBook host, so I used Atom to edit the docksal copy of docker-compose.yml to look like this:

grocy:
  ...
  volumes:
    # - database:/www
    - ./docroot:/www
  ...
# volumes:
#   database:

Then…

Ok, another visit to https://localhost confirms that the stack is working, and when I navigated back into the Master data my locations are still there. ☑️ Woot!

Docksalizing the Local Stack

Ok, not sure I did this “correctly”, but this process works.

The last command in the above sequence created a new .docksal directory in my project. Yay! It also created a new index.php file in the project’s ./docroot directory. That’s not quite right (and I’m not sure how to make fin config generate behave better), but easy to “fix”.

I opened ./.docksal/docksal.env in Atom and changed it to read:

DOCKSAL_STACK=default
# DOCROOT=docroot
DOCROOT=docroot/public

This simple change effectively moves the default DOCROOT target from ./docroot/index.php to the correct grocy target of ./docroot/public/index.php.

To test this change…

Now a visit to http://grocy-docker.docksal as directed… and the stack is still working! When I navigated back into the Master data my locations are still there too. ☑️ Woot!

To bring the stack down…

Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Weekend Improvements (the Best Kind!)

A few days ago, when this post was originally written, I also posted a “feature request” into the Grocy issues queue; specifically, it is issue 341, which is now closed.

Within a few hours there were comments posted to this issue; apparently other folks thought this would be a nice addition too. :simple_smile: Not long after that, Grocy’s author, Bernd Bestel posted this comment:

Wow… I definitely owe Bernd a beverage of his choosing next time I’m in Germany! But I digress…

Since I’m developing on a Mac, and not Windows, I can’t easily run the Grocy code “directly” out-of-the-box; I need Docker for that. Understandably, the grocy-docker project builds, or pulls, the latest tagged version of grocy/grocy, not the latest code, which resides in the master branch of the repo. So I set to work trying to figure out how to build a Docker, and then Docksal, environment from Bernd’s master.

I made this key substitution in the project’s Dockerfile-grocy, along with a few associated and necessary changes:

#        wget -t 3 -T 30 -nv -O "grocy.zip" "https://github.com/grocy/grocy/archive/v${GROCY_VERSION}.zip" && \
        wget -t 3 -T 30 -nv -O "grocy.zip" "https://github.com/grocy/grocy/zipball/master" && \

…and it works using this local command-line process to implement it all.

The first three lines ensure I’m working in the right location, then bring ALL Docker stacks down and clean-up. Line 4 removes any remnants of my previous ./docroot capture, without removing ./docroot itself. The 5th line rebuilds grocy in Docker, not Docksal, and starts up the stack. Line 6 makes a copy of the running grocy container for safe-keeping. Line 7 brings the Docker stack down. Line 8 creates an empty ./docroot/data/demo.txt file in order to populate my project with a robust set of default locations and items (see this documentation for details). Line 9 brings the new stack back up in Docksal.

Woot! It works.

I’m pushing the latest changes to the docksal branch of https://github.com/SummittDweller/grocy-docker.git at this very moment.

And that’s a wrap. Until next time…