Survey Solutions Survey
Solutions Documentation and knowledge base

Deployment with Docker

January 24, 2023

You can install and run Survey Solutions Headquarters using our official Docker image.

Prerequisite

Survey Solutions container can be executed on any hosting system that is capable of running linux/amd64 containers. Please refer to docker documentation page on how to install Docker for Your operating system - https://docs.docker.com/get-docker

Survey Solutions has linux based container image and cannot be run in Windows Containers. To run Survey Solutions in Docker on Windows you will need WSL2

You still need to have PostgreSQL server running, there is an example on doing it using docker with docker-compose.

Run Survey Solutions

Note: If you are on a Linux system, you might need to add sudo before the commands.


docker run -p 80:80 --name hq \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__TenantName=hq" \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__BaseUrl=http://localhost" \
    -e "HQ_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection=Persist Security Info=true;Server=db;Port=5432;User Id=postgres;Password=pg_password;Database=SurveySolutions" \
    surveysolutions/surveysolutions:latest

HQ_Headquarters__TenantName is required env variable in this release, this setting will be optional in future HQ_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection Connection String to Postgres instance. For parameters documentation refer to documentation

Volumes

Survey Solutions has two usages of file system that should be persisted: interview binary data (images) and logs.

Docker provide quite a lot of options on how to handle persitent data. To preserve Survey Solutions data You must map local folder into container or use Docker Volumes.

All images uploaded to HQ during interviews are stored in /app/AppData folder.

Using docker volumes

docker create volume hq_data
docker create volume data_protection

docker run -p 80:80 --name hq \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__TenantName=hq" \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__BaseUrl=http://localhost" \
    -e "HQ_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection=Server=db;Port=5432;User Id=postgres;Password=pg_password;Database=SurveySolutions" \
    -v "hq_data:/app/AppData" \
    surveysolutions/surveysolutions:latest

Using local folder

docker run -p 80:80 --name hq \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__TenantName=hq" \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__BaseUrl=http://localhost" \
    -e "HQ_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection=Server=db;Port=5432;User Id=postgres;Password=pg_password;Database=SurveySolutions" \
    -v "./data/app:/app/AppData" \
    surveysolutions/surveysolutions:latest

SSL

It is possible to run Survey Solutions with SSL in Docker. You can refer to Microsoft documentation on how to run in docker with HTTPS - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/docker-compose-https?view=aspnetcore-3.1

Following configuration can be provided to Survey Solutions with enviroment variables

Environment variables:

  • -e ASPNETCORE_URLS=https://+:443;http://+:80
  • -e ASPNETCORE_Kestrel__Certificates__Default__Path=/ssl/cert.pfx - path to SSL certificate inside docker
  • -e ASPNETCORE_Kestrel__Certificates__Default__Password - password for PFX certificate

Volume:

  • -v ./path/to/ssl.pfx:/ssl/cert.pfx

Ports

  • -p 80:80
  • -p 443:443

Full example with SSL

Assume that certificate is located in folder /srv/hq/.ssl/cert.pfx with password password

docker run -p 80:80 -p 443:443 --name hq \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__TenantName=hq" \
    -e "HQ_Headquarters__BaseUrl=https://mysurvey.example.com" \
    -e "HQ_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection=Server=192.168.192.72;Port=5432;User Id=postgres;Password=Qwerty1234;Database=SurveySolutions" \
    -e "ASPNETCORE_URLS=https://+:443;http://+:80" \
    -e "ASPNETCORE_Kestrel__Certificates__Default__Path=/ssl/cert.pfx" \
    -e "ASPNETCORE_Kestrel__Certificates__Default__Password=password" \
    -v "/srv/hq/hq_data/app:/app/AppData" \
    -v "/srv/hq/.ssl/cert.pfx:/ssl/cert.pfx" \
    surveysolutions/surveysolutions:latest

Docker-compose

Typing all those docker run parameters can be quite error prone. We provide a template for sample repository for running Survey Solutions with docker-compose in this repository https://github.com/surveysolutions/docker-compose.

While running Postgres instance in docker is viable solution, we strongly recommend to run PostgreSQL in separate server or use “managed” solutions provided by cloud providers(i.e. Amazon RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Google Cloud SQL, etc…)

Required configuration settings

There is several required configuration that You should be aware of to run in Docker.

  • HQ_Headquarters__TenantName is required in Survey Solution as of version v20.10. There is no visual features linked to this configuration. Will be dropped in future versions.
  • HQ_ConnectionStrings__DefaultConnection - connection string to Postgres database instance
  • HQ_Headquarters__BaseUrl - Base URL for HQ. Used in Web mode and emails.
  • HQ_Logging__LogsLocation: /app/AppData/logs can be configured to specify logs locations
  • Export_ExportSettings__DirectoryPath: /app/AppData/Export to preserve data export artifacts

Updating Survey Solutions

  • Stop docker container with Survey Solutions
  • Run docker pull surveysolutions/surveysolutions
  • Restart docker container