Running a Ghost blog with MariaDB behind nginx with Docker Compose

docker-compose.yml

version: '2'  
services:  
  proxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    container_name: nginx-proxy
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
      - /etc/nginx/vhost.d # to update vhost configuration
      - /usr/share/nginx/html # to write challenge files
      - /apps/web/ssl:/etc/nginx/certs:ro # update this to change cert location
  ssl-companion:
    image: jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion
    container_name: ssl-companion
    volumes:
      - /apps/web/ssl:/etc/nginx/certs:rw # same path as above, now RW
    volumes_from:
      - proxy
    depends_on:
      - proxy
  mariadb:
    image: 'bitnami/mariadb:latest'
    volumes:
       - 'mariadb_data:/bitnami/mariadb'
  blog:
    image: 'bitnami/ghost:latest'
    expose:
      - '2368'
    depends_on:
      - mariadb
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=your.blog.com
      - LETSENCRYPT_HOST=your.blog.com
      - [email protected]

Upon running docker-compose up on this, I ran into two issues:

1. ERROR: Named volume "mariadb_data:/bitnami/mariadb:rw" is used in service "mariadb" but no declaration was found in the volumes section.
   To resolve this, I modified this line:

volumes:
   - 'mariadb_data:/bitnami/mariadb'

to this:

volumes:
   - /mariadb_data:/bitnami/mariadb

2. At this point, navigating to my URL presents me with this error:

502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.13.3

It also fails to connect to the database:

Failed to connect to mariadb:3306 after 36 tries

I'm going to document this here incase anyone else was having issues and was interested in getting this working. Here's what my docker-compose.yml looked like in order for me to get a running ghost instance:

version: '2'

services:

  proxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    container_name: nginx-proxy
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
      - /etc/nginx/vhost.d # to update vhost configuration
      - /usr/share/nginx/html # to write challenge files
      - /apps/web/ssl:/etc/nginx/certs:ro # update this to change cert location

  ssl-companion:
    image: jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion
    container_name: ssl-companion
    volumes:
      - /apps/web/ssl:/etc/nginx/certs:rw # same path as above, now RW
    volumes_from:
      - proxy
    depends_on:
      - proxy

  mariadb:
    image: 'bitnami/mariadb:latest'
    volumes:
       - /mariadb_data:/bitnami/mariadb
    environment:
       - MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=some_rad_password

  blog:
    image: 'bitnami/ghost:latest'
    expose:
      - '2368'
    depends_on:
      - mariadb
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=your.blog.com
      - LETSENCRYPT_HOST=your.blog.com
      - [email protected]
    restart: always

Also, thank you very much for your hard work putting together the blog series on how to do this. I know I very much appreciate it, and I'm sure countless other do as well!

Thanks for everyone's hard work, but there's still be a problem with the latest bitmani/mariadb image,
"Error executing 'postInstallation': EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/bitnami/mariadb" ,
"chown 1001:1001 -R /mariadb_data " solved the problem.

@l50 it's usually better to use restart: unless-stopped instead of restart: always

This will restart the container on a reboot or power failure, but will not automatically restart it if stopped manually.