Tag Archives forcaprover

Caprover doesn’t set MySQL user or database

The problem: one-click app MySQL won’t create database or user

In caprover, formerly captainduckduck, I had the issue that the database and a user were not created by setting environment variables MYSQL_USER and MYSQL_DATABASE.

While building, this message was displayed by Docker: 

[Warning] One or more build-args [MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_DATABASE] were not consumed

So appearently, Caprover does not support setting the environment variables for (only?) MySQL anymore.

Selecting MySQL from the oneclick-apps gives you the following options.
Note the absence of setting extra environment variables.

adding a MySQL one-click-app in Caprover

You can only set the root password.

When you start this new app, only the root password is set. If you now set the environment variables, MySQL will not create the database or user. It does this only on first startup, after creating the one-click-app for MySQL.

Solution: supply Dockerfile with the environment variables set

My workaround? Don’t use a one-click app and supply a Dockerfile directly inside Caprover instead.

This is what I used:

  1. Create a new app (and select ‘has persistent data‘)
  2. Open the newly created app by clicking on its name in the Apps overview
  3. Click tab ‘Deployment‘
  4. Scroll down to ‘Method 4: Deploy plain Dockerfile‘
  5. Insert and edit the following content and click on ‘Deploy Now‘
ENV MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=S3cretR00t
ENV MYSQL_DATABASE=dbname_for_app
ENV MYSQL_USER=app_user
ENV MYSQL_PASSWORD=An0therS3cret
adding Dockerfile contents directly into your app

When you deploy your new database app now, the database and the user will be created.

Help your future self: set environment variables after the fact

TIP: after this, you won’t see the Dockerfile contents anymore. So in the future it might be unclear what values were set.
In order to overcome this, set the environment variables as well over at App Configs > Environmental variables:

MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=S3cretR00t
MYSQL_DATABASE=dbname_for_app
MYSQL_USER=app_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD=An0therS3cret
add the environment variables in ‘bulk mode’

That’s it! Now let’s hope we’ll be able to set environment variables in the one-click setup some day soon again.