🐳 Dockerized SendPortal

🎯 The Goal: SendPortal + HTTPS, Up and Running in Less than 10 Minutes

Containerized SendPortal email campaign manager with Docker Compose, featuring automated TLS via Caddy reverse proxy.

📑 Contents

• 🚀 Quick Start
• 🔐 Secrets
• ⏰ Cron Jobs
• 📝 Logging
• 🔒 HTTPS via Reverse Proxy
• 🧹 Cleanup (Docker Compose)
• 🛠️ Handy SendPortal Commands
• 📝 Todos

🚀 Quick Start

1. Create the DB secret & Env files

   cp secrets/env.example secrets/.env
   vim /secrets/db_password
   

2. Copy Caddyfile.example to Caddyfile. Note: example uses Let's Encrypt's stage URL.
3. docker compose up -d --build
4. Go to localhost:8080/setup to complete the configuration.
5. docker compose down -v when you want to destroy everything.

🔐 Secrets

Required files in secrets:

• db_password - MySQL root password
• .env - SendPortal configuration (If you don't have one, setup will create one)

⏰ Cron Jobs

Campaign queues are processed in SendPortal by cron jobs. First make sure the jobs database table exists:

php artisan queue:table  # Create the jobs table
php artisan migrate --force

There are many ways to run periodic jobs. Containerizing them is an option. Perhaps the simplest and most reliable method is to add the following to the compose node's crontab: crontab -e and paste in:

*/2 * * * * docker exec sendportal-app php /var/www/html/artisan queue:work --queue=sendportal-webhook-process --stop-when-empty
*/2 * * * * docker exec sendportal-app php /var/www/html/artisan queue:work --queue=sendportal-message-dispatch --stop-when-empty

* * * * * docker exec sendportal-app php /var/www/html/artisan schedule:run >> /var/log/sendportal-cron.log 2>&1

📝 Logging

SendPortal App Logs

By default application logs end up in /var/www/html/storage/logs inside the container. You can handle that in a couple ways. This demo just uses a volume mount. It would be nicer to send these to stdout instead, which we can do by setting LOG_CHANNEL env var or overriding logging.php with our own.

Apache Logs

View logs that go to stdout with docker logs sendportal-app

🔒 HTTPS via Reverse Proxy

SendPortal runs behind Caddy server, which handles TLS termination and acts as a reverse proxy. Caddy uses Let's Encrypt to get you a TLS certificate. The example Caddy Conf uses a staging Let's Encrypt endpoint to avoid rate limits. When you get a stable system working, remove the stage endpoint from the config and run caddy reload to get a signed TLS cert chain.

If you have a publicly resolvable domain, edit compose.yaml APP_URL: https://localhost

For custom Caddy configurations, refer to the Caddy documentation.

🧹 Cleanup (Docker Compose)

Remove all containers and volumes:

docker compose down -v

🛠️ Handy SendPortal Commands

Run these from within the sendportal application container if needed. The Entrypoint script handles most of this for you.

Command	Description
php artisan key:generate	Generate new application key
php artisan sp:install	Run setup programmatically
php artisan schedule:run	Process queued jobs manually
php artisan queue:table	Create the jobs table
php artisan migrate	Run DB migrations

📝 Todos:

• It would be rad to have a fully automated setup without needing to run an interactive CLI command or web based setup wizard. Can potentially accomplish this by injecting some SQL commands via the entrypoint script, or making artisan sp:install a little more robust.

• If .env file is specified we probably don't need to get db_password from secrets. It's redundant. Clean this up.

• Lots of the entrypoint.sh stuff should actually be in an init container that finishes before the app container starts. Refactor & test that.

• Adding a Redis container to process mail queues (rather than sql db) seemed like overkill for this demo, but could be nice to add.

• Add k8s manifest files and/or a helm chart with proper init and cron job containers.