friendica-github/.devcontainer

This folder holds a devcontainer definition for Friendica.

The main features are:

• The development container is based on the PHP dev container image in a variant that includes an Apache2 webserver. The variant defines the PHP version and the OS it is based on. The currently used variant is defined in the Dockerfile.

• Creating a dev container from the Git repository should give you a running development environment with no or optionally only a very little things to do after creation.

• A MariaDB container is used for the database. It can be accessed in the dev container's terminal with simple calling mysql. The needed parameters for the client are created and copied during setup. The runtime configuration needs to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost as the latter causes PHP to try to use a socket connection which is not available in this setup.

The development setup is:

• After creation of the dev container the Apache2 web server shall be availaible through port forwarding on port 8080 from your local development machine (http://localhost:8080/). This is also the url as configured in local.config.php. You should be able to log in with user 'admin@friendica.local' and password 'admin'.

• Important values are defined in the .env file within the .devcontainer folder and applied during creation wherever possible. The environment is also available during run/debug time to the application.

• XDebug can be started by the launch configuration 'Listen for Xdebug'. The launch configuration is in .vscode/launch.json (this file is added to git).

• The Apache server in the dev container is reachable with http on the ports 80 and 8080 and with https on port 443. The url used for Friendica is defined in local.config.php (currently localhost:8080) and any subsequent request will be redirected to this url. To change the url to one you like you need to modify the url in local.config.php which can be done by setting the values in the .env file accordingly and rebuilding the container.

• The hostname friendica.local is used for the ceritificate and added to the hosts file in the container. .local is a reserved TLD for mDNS and if you can use this depends on your network configuration. For developing and debugging using forwarded ports (localhost:8080) works fine.

Open points:

• Cron jobs / worker are not available. For a dev environment those are disabled by default (but can be optionally enabled).

• Passing values from the local development machine (with $localEnv) does not seem to work. This would be handy to apply a few settings differently based on user choice.

• The dev container does not have an email MTA.

• There are still a bit too much warnings logged at startup but that doesn't seem to be a problem.

• Only the first launch configuration ('Listen for Xdebug') is working.