Build Your Homelab: 36 – Plant-it in Docker With Portainer

We have looked at getting Plant-it installed as a separate LXC in our Proxmox installation with the help of some helper scripts, but today we looking at another alternative to install Plant-it. Today we will install Plant-it in our Docker environment (be it our Docker as an LCX Container or Docker in a separate VM) with the help of our previously installed Portainer service in our Docker environment.

Step 1: Get the Docker-compose file

Thus far in our Build your own homelab series, we have only installed Uptime Kuma in our Docker environment. As to use Portainer was fairly easy seeing as the install of Uptime Kuma is just one service and only one container. For Plant-it, however, we have multiple services that is going to be running, notably Plant-it, MySQL and Redis. This makes it a bit more intricate to use the same approach with Portainer as previously because setting up each service individually would be very cumbersome. Luckily there is a easy way for us to set everything up.

We need to go to the official Plant-it website: https://plant-it.org/ On the website, click the big Host the Server button which will take us to the documentation that contains the file we need. You will see the contents of the docker-compose.yaml file:

name: plant-it
services:
server:
image: msdeluise/plant-it-server:latest
env_file: server.env
depends_on:
- db
- cache
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- "./upload-dir:/upload-dir"
ports:
- "8080:8080"
- "3000:3000"
db:
image: mysql:8.0
restart: always
env_file: server.env
volumes:
- "./db:/var/lib/mysql"
cache:
image: redis:7.2.1
restart: always

As well as the contents of the server.env file, which contains our settings:

#
# DB
#
MYSQL_HOST=db
MYSQL_PORT=3306
MYSQL_USERNAME=root
MYSQL_PSW=root
MYSQL_DATABASE=bootdb
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root
#
# JWT
#
JWT_SECRET=putTheSecretHere
JWT_EXP=1
#
# Server config
#
USERS_LIMIT=-1
UPLOAD_DIR=/upload-dir
API_PORT=8080
FLORACODEX_KEY=
LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG
ALLOWED_ORIGINS=*
#
# Cache
#
CACHE_TTL=86400
CACHE_HOST=cache
CACHE_PORT=6379

With both of these files ready to go, we can use Portainer to install Plant-it.

Step 2: Configure Portainer

Last time round, we “manually” created the images, volumes and networks for Docker to Uptime Kuma. This time, with the two files from step 1, the process is a lot Simpler. First access your Portainer instance from the URL where you have it hosted. This can be the IP address of your Docker Machine on port 9443 by default, running on https. In our environment, the address is https://192.168.1.35:9443/

Log in to view your environments. In the screenshots below you will see that we have two environments: local and a second one managing another server. Select the environment you want to install Plant-it in. From the left navigation menu, select Stacks. In the main window, click the button to add a new stack. A stack is a collection of containers running as a single service. This is where we can use our Docker Compose file to set up all the containers as one.

From the previous step, take the docker-compose.yaml file contents and add it to the web editor section. We need to make some changes though. Firstly, the official website mentions the server.env file for settings, which we obviously cannot create. However, if you look at the Environment Variables section in the Portainer Create Stack screen, you will see that Portainer will create a stack.env file for us. So, in the web editor containing the copied docker-compose.yaml file contents, change the server.env to stack.env in both the server and db section’s env_file variable.

Secondly, and optionally, if you don’t want Plant-it to use the default ports (8080 and 3000) we can change that as well in the ports section. We want to use port 8088 and port 3033 on our Docker machine (host) so we will change the ports to 8088:8080 and 3033:3000 respectively. What this means is that the Container’s port 8080 will be “mapped” to port 8088 on the Docker Machine, and port 3000 from the container will be mapped to port 3033 on the Docker Machine.

The completed Docker Compose section is:

name: plant-it
services:
server:
image: msdeluise/plant-it-server:latest
env_file: stack.env
depends_on:
- db
- cache
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- "./upload-dir:/upload-dir"
ports:
- "8088:8080"
- "3033:3000"
db:
image: mysql:8.0
restart: always
env_file: stack.env
volumes:
- "./db:/var/lib/mysql"
cache:
image: redis:7.2.1
restart: always

Next up we need to populate the stack.env file with the values from the official site’s server.env file contents. In the Environments Variable section in Portainer, select the Advanced Mode. This will open a normal text editor for us to copy-and-paste the values from the Plant-it wesbite:

#
# DB
#
MYSQL_HOST=db
MYSQL_PORT=3306
MYSQL_USERNAME=root
MYSQL_PSW=root
MYSQL_DATABASE=bootdb
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root
#
# JWT
#
JWT_SECRET=putTheSecretHere
JWT_EXP=1
#
# Server config
#
USERS_LIMIT=-1
UPLOAD_DIR=/upload-dir
API_PORT=8080
FLORACODEX_KEY=
LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG
ALLOWED_ORIGINS=*
#
# Cache
#
CACHE_TTL=86400
CACHE_HOST=cache
CACHE_PORT=6379

You will see the comment parts will be removed (lines starting with #), this is not a problem. You are welcome to change the value for the JWT_SECRETfield to anything you want (or leave it as default putTheSecretHere)

That’s it, click the button. The stack will now be deployed. Once done, you will be able to see it in the Stacks section of your dashboard where you will also be able to see the three containers that is within the stack.

Step 3: Access Plant-it

Once the stack has been deployed, be patient with the server part of Plant-it: it can take a few minutes to start up completely. Access the Plant-it front end from the Docker IP address on the port specified: in our case 3033. So the complete URL will be http://192.168.1.35:3033. The first screen will request you to input the server URL. Add the URL on the same IP address, but the 8080 port (which we changed to 8088), so http://192.168.1.35:8088. If there is an error message that the server does not exist, please just give it a few minutes for the server to start up completely.

Once the server is set, you will be prompted to log in. We need to first create a user account, so click that and create a new user account.

Conclusion

We have now looked at two different ways of installing Plant-it. This article looks at using Docker and Portainer, where the previous article looked at installing Plant-it as a LXC Container. Either way, we still need to configure Plant-it, so whichever way it is installed, the next instalment will look at the Configuration and Reverse Proxy for Plant-it. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of our Plant-it service install.

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