How to configure supervisor in docker correctly

I have a working laravel environment using docker. my projects has multiple services in different container such as redis, mongodb, mysqldb and nodejs. I want to use supervisor on my project to interact with redis for the queues and php to run the job. I have done some testing and research but I really can’t make it work.

so here is my DockerFile:

FROM php:7.3-fpm

# Copy composer.lock and composer.json
COPY composer.lock composer.json /var/www/

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /var/www

# Install dependencies
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y 
    build-essential 
    mariadb-client 
    libpng-dev 
    libzip-dev 
    libjpeg62-turbo-dev 
    libfreetype6-dev 
    locales 
    zip 
    jpegoptim optipng pngquant gifsicle 
    vim 
    unzip 
    git 
    curl 
    cron 
    supervisor

# Clear cache
RUN apt-get clean && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# Install extensions
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql mbstring zip exif pcntl
RUN docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/ --with-png-dir=/usr/include/
RUN docker-php-ext-install gd
RUN docker-php-ext-configure bcmath --enable-bcmath
RUN docker-php-ext-install bcmath

# install mongodb ext
RUN pecl install mongodb 
    && docker-php-ext-enable mongodb

# Install composer
RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

# Add user for laravel application
RUN groupadd -g 1000 www
RUN useradd -u 1000 -ms /bin/bash -g www www

# Copy supervisor configs
COPY supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf

# Copy existing application directory contents
COPY . /var/www

# Copy existing application directory permissions
COPY --chown=www:www . /var/www

COPY supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf

CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]

# Change current user to www
USER www

# Expose port 9000 and start php-fpm server
EXPOSE 9000
CMD ["php-fpm"]

and my docker-compose.yml file

version: '3'
services:

  #PHP Service
  php:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: digitalocean.com/php
    container_name: php
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    environment:
      SERVICE_NAME: php
      SERVICE_TAGS: dev
    working_dir: /var/www
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www
      - ./php/local.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/local.ini
      - ./supervisord.conf:/etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf
    networks:
      - app-network

  #NODEJS Service
  nodejs: 
    image: node:10
    container_name: nodejs
    restart: unless-stopped
    working_dir: /var/www
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www
    tty: true
    networks:
      - app-network

  #Nginx Service
  nginx:
    image: nginx:alpine
    container_name: nginx
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www
      - ./nginx/conf.d/:/etc/nginx/conf.d/
    networks:
      - app-network

  #MySQL Service
  mysqldb:
    image: mysql:5.7.22
    container_name: mysqldb
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${DB_DATABASE}
      MYSQL_USER: ${DB_USERNAME}
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${DB_ROOT_PASSWORD}
      SERVICE_TAGS: dev
      SERVICE_NAME: mysql
    volumes:
      - dbdata:/var/lib/mysql
      - ./mysql/my.cnf:/etc/mysql/my.cnf
    networks:
      - app-network

  #MongoDB Service
  mongodb:
    image: mongo:3
    container_name: mongodb
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    ports: 
      - "27017:27017"
    networks: 
      - app-network

  #Redis Service
  redis:
    image: redis
    container_name: redis
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    ports: 
      - "${REDIS_PORT}:6379"
    networks:
      - app-network

#Docker Networks
networks:
  app-network:
    driver: bridge

#Volumes
volumes:
  dbdata: 
    driver: local

you might also want to see my supervisord.conf

[supervisord]
user=www
nodaemon=true
logfile=/dev/null
logfile_maxbytes=0
pidfile=/var/run/supervisord.pid
loglevel = INFO

[unix_http_server]
file=/var/run/supervisor.sock
chmod=0700
username=www
password=www

[supervisorctl]
serverurl=unix:///var/run/supervisord.sock
username=www
password=www

[rpcinterface:supervisor]
supervisor.rpcinterface_factory=supervisor.rpcinterface:make_main_rpcinterface

[program:php-fpm]
command = /usr/local/sbin/php-fpm
autostart=true
autorestart=true
priority=5
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0

[program:ohwo-worker]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=php /var/www/artisan horizon
autostart=false
autorestart=true
user=www
numprocs=1
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/www/laravel-worker.log

so from that setup. when the containers is UP it seems that supervisord is not working because if I run php artisan horizon manually on my php container the queuing works perfectly. btw horizon is the tool i use for queuing.

and then I also try to run supervisorctl on my php container and I got this error unix:///var/run/supervisord.sock no such file

so I’m just pretty new to docker just started few months ago. I do know how to configure supervisord on linux but i can’t make it work on docker.

so please pardon my stupidity 🙂

Answer

The idea here is to eliminate the supervisor and instead run whatever the supervisor used to run in several different containers. You can easily orchestrate this with docker-compose, for example, all running the same container with different CMD overrides, or the same container with a different CMD layer at the end to split it out. The trouble here is the supervisor won’t be able to communicate the status of the processes it manages to Docker. It will always be “alive” even if all of its processes are completely trashed. Exposing those directly means you get to see they crashed.

What’s best is to break out each of these services into separate containers. Since there’s official pre-built ones for MySQL and so on there’s really no reason to build one yourself. What you want to do is translate that supervisord config to docker-compose format.

With separate containers you can do things like docker ps to see if your services are running correctly, they’ll all be listed individually. If you need to upgrade one then you can do that easily, you just work with that one container, instead of having to pull down the whole thing.

The way you’re attacking it here is treating Docker like a fancy VM, which it really isn’t. What it is instead is a process manager, where these processes just so happen to have pre-built disk images and a security layer around them.

Compose your environment out of single-process containers and your life will be way easier both from a maintenance perspective, and a monitoring one.

If you can express this configuration as something docker-compose can deal with then you’re one step closer to moving to a more sophisticated management layer like Kubernetes which might be the logical conclusion of this particular migration.