Playing with Percona XtraDB Cluster in Docker

[This article was written by Sveta Smirnova]

Like any good, thus lazy, engineer I don’t like to start things manually. Creating directories, configuration files, specify paths, ports via command line is too boring. I wrote already how I survive in case when I need to start MySQL server (here). There is also the MySQL Sandbox which can be used for the same purpose.

But what to do if you want to start Percona XtraDB Cluster this way? Fortunately we, at Percona, have engineers who created automation solution for starting PXC. This solution uses Docker. To explore it you need:

1. Clone the pxc-docker repository:git clone https://github.com/percona/pxc-docker
2. Install Docker Compose as described here
3. cd pxc-docker/docker-bld
4. Follow instructions from the README file:

   a) ./docker-gen.sh 5.6    (docker-gen.sh takes a PXC branch as argument, 5.6 is default, and it looks for it on github.com/percona/percona-xtradb-cluster)

   b) Optional: docker-compose build (if you see it is not updating with changes).

   c) docker-compose scale bootstrap=1 members=2 for a 3 node cluster

5. Check which ports assigned to containers:

$docker port dockerbld_bootstrap_1 3306
0.0.0.0:32768
$docker port dockerbld_members_1 4567
0.0.0.0:32772
$docker port dockerbld_members_2 4568
0.0.0.0:32776

Now you can connect to MySQL clients as usual:

$mysql -h 0.0.0.0 -P 32768 -uroot
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 10
Server version: 5.6.21-70.1 MySQL Community Server (GPL), wsrep_25.8.rXXXX
Copyright (c) 2009-2015 Percona LLC and/or its affiliates
Copyright (c) 2000, 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the current input statement.
mysql> 

6.  To change MySQL options either pass it as a mount at runtime with something like volume: /tmp/my.cnf:/etc/my.cnf in docker-compose.yml or connect to container’s bash (docker exec -i -t container_name /bin/bash), then change my.cnf and run docker restart container_name

Notes.

• If you don’t want to build use ready-to-use images
• If you don’t want to run Docker Compose as root user add yourself to docker group