what's the proper way to add a Flarum extension?

[PrimateCoder]

Hi @shinsenter!

I've tried a couple of ways of adding Flarum extensions to shinsenter/flarum:latest but none of them seem to work properly.

1. I tried to add "RUN composer require " in the Dockerfile, but if I do this then Flarum doesn't get installed at all, only the extension does.
2. I added a new start up script named 99-add-flarum-extensions.sh, but although this works, the script gets run on every start up and that is unnecessary. I could make the script self-delete, but that is hacky.

What is the proper/official way to add additional Flarum extensions to your image?

Secondly, Flarum complains that certain directories don't have the correct permissions out of the box. I had to add these to my commands:

chmod -R g+w /var/www/html/storage
chmod g+w /var/www/html/public/assets/

How does it work for you?

Thanks so much for the great work!

[shinsenter]

Hi @PrimateCoder,

Thank you for reaching out with your question.

Since I don't know the exact content of the project directory or the Dockerfile you are using, it's difficult for me to reproduce and figure out the issue you mentioned.

Therefore, I will assume that you have a directory www containing the source code of Flarum and all the necessary packages for your project are declared in the composer.json file and a Dockerfile for building your Docker image. You then copy the www directory into your Docker container, install additional packages using composer, and adjust the permissions for the directories within Flarum's document root. Given this scenario, you might try using the following Dockerfile to build your Docker image according to your requirements:

FROM shinsenter/flarum:latest

# copy the `www` directory into the container
ENV APP_PATH=/var/www/html
ADD --link --chown="$APP_USER:$APP_GROUP" ./www/ $APP_PATH/

# install additional packages using composer
RUN cd $APP_PATH && composer install

# adjust the permissions for directories
RUN mkdir -p $APP_PATH/html/storage $APP_PATH/public/assets
RUN chmod -R "$APP_USER:$APP_GROUP" $APP_PATH

Best regards,
TAN

[PrimateCoder]

Thank you very much for the detailed answer!

In the end, I concluded that it was more optimal to start with your PHP Docker image because then I could install flarum and all the extensions at build time rather than runtime. Effectively, I think that's also your suggestion above.

I believe with your current flarum image, by default, flarum is installed only when the container is first started. I think it would be more predictable to handle the installation process when building the image and so that's why I decided to use your excellent PHP Docker images directly.

Thank you!
Navin.