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).

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

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:

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

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

image: atlassian/confluence-server

with

build: ./confl-mysql

(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 is 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:

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

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

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

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:

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

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]

Now we're in business:

Complete config, and now the containers are up!