How to use planetscale from a docker setup

[Flyingmana]

As far as I understand the documentation, one needs to install the pscale CLI to establish a connection.

Iam a php developer.
I nowdays usually make use of docker or even host things in docker based environments.
Therefore it would be a great addition to also have an example how to establish this connection with docker.
And if its necessary to have it inside the app container, or if it can be a separate container which is used analog to any other database container.

[aquarapid]

@Flyingmana good point! We'll work on an example of how to add the pscale CLI to a docker container, passing in auth, etc.

[Anders-PlanetScale]

Howdy,

The PlanetScale engineering team is working on building an official docker image but in the mean time I have written up a Dockerfile example which can be used to run a container that connects to a PlanetScale DB using pscale connect and exposes the connection port.

Dockerfile.txt

To use it you save it in a local directory as Dockerfile and then run

docker build . from within the directory you saved it in.

You can then create an env_file (here is a template)
env_file_example.txt

save your env_file in the same dir and edit the environment variables with your unique variable values.

Then you can run the docker image using the image ID your docker build command output OR you can find the ID using docker image ls and finding the recently created Image ID

docker run -p 3306:3306 --env-file env_file <docker-image-ID>

Feel free to build upon this example as you see fit and let us know if you have any questions.

I want to note that this is pretty close to what @Exellin shared previously, but is a bit more generic/slimmed down. Thanks for sharing your work Exellin!

[Anders-PlanetScale]

Oh I should note that my Dockerfile is assuming an i386 workstation you may need to change the pscale package based on your system.

[Exellin]

I have been comparing a bunch of setups recently and added a docker planetscale solution here: https://github.com/Exellin/node-graphql-comparisons/tree/master/entrypoints/docker-planetscale-mercurius-fastify-Graphql-js-Objection. I am fairly new to docker and typescript in general, so probably lots of improvements to make. My plan is to try out connecting google cloud run to planetscale.

The main things to take away were:

1. That I had to download and run tar on the executable from github with the following (Is there a way to always grab the latest?):

ADD https://github.com/planetscale/cli/releases/download/v0.36.0/pscale_0.36.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz .
RUN [ "tar", "zxvf", "pscale_0.36.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz", "-C", "/usr/bin" ]

2. That I had to create a .env file and pass in the following environment variables:

ARG PLANETSCALE_ORG
ENV PLANETSCALE_ORG=$PLANETSCALE_ORG

ARG PLANETSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN_NAME
ENV PLANETSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN_NAME=$PLANETSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN_NAME

ARG PLANETSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN
ENV PLANETSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN=$PLANETSCALE_SERVICE_TOKEN

3. Had to run CMD with node index.js as a single command here:

CMD ["pscale", "connect", "node-graphql-comparisons", "main", "--execute", "node index.js"]

I run docker build ., then docker run -p --env-file .env 4000:4000 ID

[Anders-PlanetScale]

Howdy @Exellin,

I opened an issue to see if we can change our release package naming to be consistent across releases. If we can do that, it would allow you to pull the latest version of a package using something like;
wget https://github.com/planetscale/cli/releases/latest/pscale_linux_386.deb

[mscoutermarsh]

Hi all,

We now have a published docker image available. Instructions are in the CLI docs here: https://github.com/planetscale/cli#container-images.

If you have any feedback, please let us know here or open an issue in the CLI repo. 😄

[hhimanshu]

@jgreet , thanks a ton for your response. Just to make sure I understand everything, this is what I should do

1. Use MySQL 8 docker image in local machine during development.
2. When ready to deploy, take the schema and data to PlanetScale using pscale (I don't know how yet)
   Does this aligns with your advice?

[jgreet]

1. Yes, use MySQL 8.

2. Most of the time you'll want to create a connection string and pass those details in to your application's database config as you would for any other database:
   https://planetscale.com/docs/onboarding/connect-to-your-database#create-a-connection-string

You could use pscale shell (if you also have the MySQL CLI client installed) to quickly open a MySQL shell, or pscale connect to open a proxy on a local port for any other client you'd want to use. But you don't have to use pscale to connect to a database branch and I imagine most people don't at this point.

There was a point in the past where running pscale connect was the best way to connect to a branch on PlanetScale but that hasn't been true for a while now and is no longer recommended for production environments.

[hhimanshu]

This is huge help, thank you @jgreet

[fooforge]

@hhimanshu When you develop locally on your MySQL Community Server, keep in mind that Vitess has some compatibility gaps towards MySQL. We're continuously working on closing the gap and they're not a big deal if you develop a new app from scratch, but I wanted to drop this here for your awareness and to save your future self some refactoring time. ;-)

[hhimanshu]

@fooforge , thank you for the heads up! We will keep this in mind even though we are going to start an app from scratch