Getting started

Flight Deck has only been tested on macOS and Linux. It should work on Windows, but this is untested.

Installing Docker

Flight Deck is based on Docker. Docker allows you to spin up multiple, lightweight virtual environments on your system called "containers". You can find out more about containers on training.docker.org.

  1. Download Docker for macOS or Docker for Windows.
  2. Run the installer and follow on-screen instructions.
  3. Restart your computer when finished.

Adding Flight Deck to your project

When using Flight Deck, it's best to add it permanently to your project repository. That way, anyone working on that project has access to the some stack of containers.

Flight Deck assumes that the docroot/webroot of your PHP project is in a subdirectory of your git repository. This is typically named docroot, webroot, src, or public_html. Flight Deck assumes src.

  1. Reorganize your repository, if necessary.
  2. Download a copy of Flight Deck from github. This can be either from a zip, or cloning the repo.
  3. Copy the db-backups directory into the root of your project.
  4. Copy the .env file into the root of your project.
  5. If your project is Drupal 6 or 7, copy docker-compose.d7-apache.yml into the root of your project. For Drupal 8, copy docker-compose.d8-apache.yml.
  6. Rename the file you copied in the previous step to docker-compose.yml.

Configuring settings

Flight Deck keeps it's configuration settings in the .env file. This includes the database name, user, and password, the varnish secret, if XDebug is enabled, and more.

The .env file comes with sensible defaults, but you may wish to change them.

Starting Flight Deck

Once the proper files have been deployed and the .env file configured, you're ready to start Flight Deck for the first time.

  1. Place a MySQL dump in the db-backups directory. This can be in uncompressed SQL, but also in gzip, zip, xs, or lzo format.
  2. Open a terminal and change to your project root.
  3. Start Flight Deck with the following command: docker-compose up -d
  4. Note that the first build will take longer, as container images need to be downloaded from hub.docker.com. Subsequent restarts will be on the order of seconds.
  5. Using a web browser, navigate to localhost.