A quick web UI for database management in docker-compose!

I have a lot of half-finished blog posts that I want to finish up soon coming back from both Reclaim Open and a week-long family vacation, but hey I might as well finish up this old draft as I used this trick yet again today. I’ve got to get the blog momentum going after a few month’s hiatus!

I work with docker and docker-compose very often for Reclaim Cloud stuff nowadays, and while I’m pretty comfortable with bind-mounts, docker volumes, and docker cp for getting files in and out of containers, doing serious things with databases still scares me a little. While I can use the CLI to do some stuff, I really like a UI when I need to poke around a database; particularly with anything more complicated than a dump or restore. In cPanel-land phpMyAdmin is already set up and ready to go, but I don’t have that luxury when working with docker-compose based stuff.

That’s where Adminer comes in handy. Tom Woodward mentioned it in a WPMS workshop (I think WPMS101 last fall?) and I was intrigued because it could do a lot of what phpMyAdmin does, but for any type of database (not just MySQL). On top of that, you only need to “install” a single PHP file, or add a few lines to a docker-compose setup!

Starting it

Now, whenever I need it, I can simply add a few lines to the “services” section of any docker-compose.yml file:

  adminer:
    image: adminer
    ports:
      - '8080:8080'

Here it is in the context of WordPress running in docker-compose¹:

version: "3"

services:
  wordpress:
    image: wordpress
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 80:80
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: mysql
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: foo
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: bar 
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress_db
    volumes:
      - ./public_html:/var/www/html
  mysql:
    image: mysql
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress_db
      MYSQL_USER: foo
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: bar 
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: 1 
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql
  adminer:
    image: adminer
    ports:
      - '8080:8080'

Then I can start it up:

docker-compose up -d

I visit it by appending :8080 to the domain name of the thing I am running. In my example below, I’m just running it on my local computer, so the address is http://localhost:8080

I can log in using the info I already know from my docker-compose file, and I get a very basic, but usable interface!

Removing it

Then, when I am done, I just comment out the lines for Adminer:

version: "3"

services:
  wordpress:
    image: wordpress
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 80:80
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: mysql
      WORDPRESS_DB_USER: foo
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: bar 
      WORDPRESS_DB_NAME: wordpress_db
    volumes:
      - ./public_html:/var/www/html
  mysql:
    image: mysql
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress_db
      MYSQL_USER: foo
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: bar 
      MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD: yes
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql
  #adminer:
  #  image: adminer
  #  ports:
  #    - '8080:8080'

Finally, I run this command to stop Adminer, without having to restart any other docker containers:

docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans

Stopping Adminer when it’s not in use saves on resources², as well as provides the security benefit of completing eliminating the possibility that anyone could log in to it.

Yes, I know that technically for a PHP app like WordPress, I could just drop Adminer’s single PHP file in the web root instead of adding lines to my docker-compose file, but I figured a WordPress-based docker-compose example would still be a good one to go with. ↩︎

Not that it really uses many 🤷🏻‍♂️ ↩︎