The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Rance Hall <address@concealed>]

I'd like to echo Marc's comments re: Sympa and Docker.

I wrote a working Docker container for SYMPA, but I had to break all the rules of Docker to get it to work.

For example:  Sympa seems to be hard coded to log to /dev/log, and if you don't have a /dev/log in your environment when Sympa starts, sympa will just die.

I solved this problem by using the S6 service manager in a container and running a logging server that created a /dev/log and it was configured to pipe its logs to an external logging server via an environment variable.

Linking a postfix and a sympa container never worked for me because of the way sympa manages the list alias file templates, so it appears to me that postfix must be running in the same container as Sympa.

In our implementation the Sympa server does not send email directly to the internet but instead uses a smarthost to do that, so the smarthost is an environment variable.

All in all I'm pleased with the results, but It's definitely not an example of how to docker, its an example of how to make docker work for you with an app that is not designed to be containerized.

It's my guess, but I suspect that Sympa would need to be completely refactored to make it be a truly containerizable (sp?) app.

Rance Hall

List Manager

ESU 10

Kearney, Nebraska, USA

---

From: Marc Chantreux <address@concealed>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2018 2:20:08 AM
To: address@concealed
Subject: Re: [sympa-users] Docker for Sympa

 

hello David,

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 10:52:06PM +0000, Dave Page wrote:
> I've found a number of Docker containers for Sympa but I was wondering
> if there's one recommended by the Sympa community?

we started your own one during the last hackathon but we never finished
it because:

* the philosophy of docker is to contain one process by image
* sympa run multiple processes

so basically we should use something like docker composer or swarm +
shared directories. how does lock react then? i don't know.  the project
didn't go anyway because of my lack of knowledge and motivation for
docker.

i'm not aware of the other docker images, none is official but if you
can list them, maybe we can contac the authors and welcome them to the
project.

there is also a Vagrant env. for devel purpose here:

    https://github.com/sympa-community/ansible-webmail-server

regards
marc