Install Sourcegraph with Docker Compose on Digital Ocean

This tutorial shows you how to deploy Sourcegraph via Docker Compose to a single Droplet running on DigitalOcean.

We strongly recommend that you create your own fork of sourcegraph/deploy-sourcegraph-docker to track customizations to the Sourcegraph Docker Compose yaml. This will make upgrades far easier.

See "Store customizations in a fork" for full instructions.

Run Sourcegraph on a Digital Ocean Droplet

  • Create a new Digital Ocean Droplet.

    • Set the operating system to be Ubuntu 18.04.
    • For droplet size: use the resource estimator to find a good starting point for your deployment.
    • (optional, recommended) Set up SSH access (Authentication > SSH keys) for convenient access to the droplet.
    • (optional, recommended) Check the "Enable backups" checkbox to enable weekly backups of all your data.

  • In the "Select additional options" section of the Droplet creation page, select the "User Data" and "Monitoring" boxes, and paste the following script in the "Enter user data here..." text box:

    • (optional) If you created a fork as recommended above, update the following environment variables in the script below:
      • DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_CLONE_URL: Your fork's git clone URL
      • DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_REVISION: The git revision containing your fork's customizations to the base Sourcegraph Docker Compose yaml. Most likely, DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_REVISION='release' if you followed our branching recommendations in "Store customizations in a fork".
#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euxo pipefail

PERSISTENT_DISK_DEVICE_NAME='/dev/sda'
DOCKER_DATA_ROOT='/mnt/docker-data'

DOCKER_COMPOSE_VERSION='1.25.3'
DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_CHECKOUT='/root/deploy-sourcegraph-docker'

# 🚨 Update these variables with the correct values from your fork!
DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_CLONE_URL='https://github.com/sourcegraph/deploy-sourcegraph-docker.git'
DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_REVISION='v3.14.2'

# Install git
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y git

# Clone Docker Compose definition
git clone "${DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_CLONE_URL}" "${DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_CHECKOUT}"
cd "${DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_CHECKOUT}"
git checkout "${DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_FORK_REVISION}"

# Format (if necessary) and mount DO persistent disk
device_fs=$(sudo lsblk "${PERSISTENT_DISK_DEVICE_NAME}" --noheadings --output fsType)
if [ "${device_fs}" == "" ] ## only format the volume if it isn't already formatted
then
    sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0,discard "${PERSISTENT_DISK_DEVICE_NAME}"
fi
sudo mkdir -p "${DOCKER_DATA_ROOT}"
sudo mount -o discard,defaults "${PERSISTENT_DISK_DEVICE_NAME}" "${DOCKER_DATA_ROOT}"

# Mount DO disk on reboots
DISK_UUID=$(sudo blkid -s UUID -o value "${PERSISTENT_DISK_DEVICE_NAME}")
sudo echo "UUID=${DISK_UUID}  ${DOCKER_DATA_ROOT}  ext4  discard,defaults,nofail  0  2" >> '/etc/fstab'
umount "${DOCKER_DATA_ROOT}"
mount -a

# Install Docker
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
sudo apt-get update -y
apt-cache policy docker-ce
apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

# Install jq for scripting
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y jq

# Edit Docker storage directory to mounted volume
DOCKER_DAEMON_CONFIG_FILE='/etc/docker/daemon.json'

## initialize the config file with empty json if it doesn't exist
if [ ! -f "${DOCKER_DAEMON_CONFIG_FILE}" ]
then
    mkdir -p $(dirname "${DOCKER_DAEMON_CONFIG_FILE}")
    echo '{}' > "${DOCKER_DAEMON_CONFIG_FILE}"
fi

## update Docker's 'data-root' to point to our mounted disk
tmp_config=$(mktemp)
trap "rm -f ${tmp_config}" EXIT
sudo cat "${DOCKER_DAEMON_CONFIG_FILE}" | sudo jq --arg DATA_ROOT "${DOCKER_DATA_ROOT}" '.["data-root"]=$DATA_ROOT' > "${tmp_config}"
sudo cat "${tmp_config}" > "${DOCKER_DAEMON_CONFIG_FILE}"

## finally, restart Docker daemon to pick up our changes
sudo systemctl restart --now docker

# Install Docker Compose
curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/${DOCKER_COMPOSE_VERSION}/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
curl -L "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/compose/${DOCKER_COMPOSE_VERSION}/contrib/completion/bash/docker-compose" -o /etc/bash_completion.d/docker-compose

# Run Sourcegraph. Restart the containers upon reboot.
cd "${DEPLOY_SOURCEGRAPH_DOCKER_CHECKOUT}"/docker-compose
docker-compose up -d

  • Click on "Add Volume" and add new block storage with the following settings:

    • Size: We recommend > 250 GB. (As a rule of thumb, Sourcegraph needs at least as much space as all your repositories combined take up. Allocating as much disk space as you can upfront helps you avoid needing to select a droplet with a larger root disk later on.)
    • Under Chose configuration options, select "Manually Format and Mount"

  • You may have to wait a minute or two for the instance to finish initializing before Sourcegraph becomes accessible. You can monitor the status by SSHing into the Droplet and running the following diagnostic commands:

# Follow the status of the user data script you provided earlier
tail -f /var/log/cloud-init-output.log

# (Once the user data script completes) monitor the health of the "sourcegraph-frontend" container
docker ps --filter="name=sourcegraph-frontend-0"
  • Navigate to the droplet's IP address to finish initializing Sourcegraph. If you have configured a DNS entry for the IP, configure externalURL to reflect that.

After initialization

After initial setup, we recommend you do the following:

  • Restrict the accessibility of ports other than 80 and 443 via Cloud Firewalls.
  • Set up TLS/SSL) in the Docker Compose deployment

Update your Sourcegraph version

To update to the most recent version of Sourcegraph (X.Y.Z), SSH into your instance and run the following:

cd /root/deploy-sourcerph-docker/docker-compose
git pull
git checkout vX.Y.Z
docker-compose up -d

Storage and Backups

The Sourcegraph Docker Compose definition uses Docker volumes to store its data. The script above configures Docker to store all Docker data on the additional block storage volume that was attached to the droplet (mounted at /mnt/docker-data - the volumes themselves are stored under /mnt/docker-data/volumes) There are a few different ways to backup this data:

Using an external database for persistence

The Docker Compose configuration has its own internal PostgreSQL and Redis databases. To preserve this data when you kill and recreate the containers, you can use external services for persistence, such as Digital Ocean Managed Databases for Postgres, Redis, and Spaces for storing user uploads.