phpIPAM via podman-compose

You can use containers inside container orchestration platforms and of course you can do that with phpIPAM as well, but in my case I just wanted the convenience of the container packaging approach and running it on a single Linux host without having to worry about the overheads of K8S style platforms.

I was using a RHEL derivative, Alma Linux 9.0 in this case and also using Podman rather than Docker.

I did want to use the docker-compose approach to configuring and maintaining the application. The compose format makes it really quite simple to deploy and maintain simple container applications that are single system hosted.

Since I wasn’t using Docker, rather Podman, I found that you can use a tool called podman-compose to orchestrate podman to deliver the outcome you’d expect from a docker-compose file.

Firstly, start like this, getting podman and pip3 installed.

 yum install podman python3-pip

Then it’s simple to install podman-compose

pip3 install podman-compose

With a docker-compose.yml file similar to the following (change the default passwords i’ve put in the file) you can get going very quickly.

version: '3'

services:
  phpipam-web:
    image: docker.io/phpipam/phpipam-www:latest
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    environment:
      - TZ=Australia/Melbourne
      - IPAM_DATABASE_HOST=phpipam-mariadb
      - IPAM_DATABASE_USER=root
      - IPAM_DATABASE_PASS=<mysql_root_pass>
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - phpipam-logo:/phpipam/css/images/logo
    depends_on:
      - phpipam-mariadb

  phpipam-mariadb:
    image: docker.io/library/mariadb:latest
    environment:
      - MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=<mysql_root_pass>
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - phpipam-db-data:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
  phpipam-db-data:
  phpipam-logo:

Then it’s as simple as

podman-compose up -d

Then you connect to the IP address of your underlying system, and execute the installation dialogue. You should only need to enter the MySQL/MariaDB username / password, everything else should be pre-filled with the correct information.