There are several ways to import the data in your docker-compose setup.

1. Using a volume for import data
2. Using mysql client from commandline with docker-compose exec
3. Using phpmyadmin in docker-compose setup
4. Using a mysql GUI client on the host and connect to the DB in the Docker container

So let’s see how we can do this:

1. Using a volume for import data

This applies to both official Mysql and MariaDB official images.
These have builtin import mechanism to import data.
To quote from the docs:

Furthermore, it will execute files with extensions .sh, .sql and .sql.gz that are found in /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d. Files will be executed in alphabetical order. You can easily populate your mysql services by mounting a SQL dump into that directory

So all dumps that are found in the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d directory of the image will be imported unless the database already contains data.

So let’s add this volume to our docker-compose.yaml

volumes: - ./database_dump.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/datadump.sql

On next docker-compose up the data will be imported in your empty database.
You will see something like this in your docker-compose logs:

2023-02-06 15:40:16+00:00 [Note] [Entrypoint]: /usr/local/bin/docker-entrypoint.sh: running /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/database_dump.sql

Note: if there is already data in the database you need to clear the data first by f.e. clearing the volume, otherwise the import will not start:
You can clear all volumes of your docker-compose setup with (caution: this will clear all volumes, not just the database volume):

docker-compose down -v

2. Using mysql client from commandline with docker-compose exec

With this one liner you can import a SQL dump from a docker image that has a MySql/MariaDB client installed and are linked to the DB container:

docker-compose exec my-app bash -c "mysql -u root -h mysql --password=root database < database_dump.sql"

This will execute the application image and import the data with the mysql client which connects to the host mysql which is the linked mysql container.

3. Use phpmyadmin in docker-compose setup

If the above is too consolish then you also can just add a phpmyaadmin container in your docker-compose setup and administer the database with a GUI from the browser.

  myproject_phpmyadmin:
	image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin:latest
	ports:
	  - 8080:80
	environment:
	  PMA_HOST: myproject_mysql

Then you can just open http://localhost:8080 in the browser and log into to Phpmyadmin.
To import data go to the import tab and upload the dump file.

4. Using a mysql GUI client on the host and connect to the DB in the Docker container

For this approach you just need to open a port in the database container to the outside and use this port with localhost in the settings of your database client.

  myproject_mysql:
    image: mysql:5.7
    hostname: mysql.${DOMAIN}
    container_name: ${CONTAINER_NAME}.mysql
      volumes:
	- ${PWD}/data/mysql/:/var/lib/mysql
	- ./container/mysql/my.cnf:/etc/mysql/conf.d/z_my.cnf
    ports: # open the mysql port to the host
      - "3306:3306"
    environment:
  ...

See this screenshot from IntellIj’s PHPStorm Database tool:

From my experience these clients are very good to check data but not so good for import, at least I had rather poor experience in the PHPStorm DB Tool.
So going consolish on imports is recommended :)

ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network

The easiest (and most brute though) solution to this is to prune all networks, as suggested here on SO.

docker network prune

This will delete all networks that are not connected to currently active containers.
But this also means it will delete all networks of your not runnning dev projects.
(Which might be numerous as in my case.)

2. So next time you spin up another dev project the network will be missing, as it has been pruned and you will see this error:

Could not attach to network 726...: rpc error: code = NotFound desc = network 726... not found

Ok sure, the network is gone, but no problem let’s recreate it.
As described in this blog post.
We can simply add the —force-recreate option to docker-compose up and run it once then remove the option again to continue as usual.

docker-compose up --force-recreate

Also described here on SO.

Then we are back to normal in our dev docker environments.

Unknown MySQL server host <mysql-service-name>

… and you dont know why because everything seems to be correct.

Then you might have an upgrade problem with mysql because you are reusing an old volume that was created for another mysql version.
This can happen when you use a unspecified tag as mysql:latest (not recommended anyway) and there was a version bump in the official mysql image.
Or you upgraded the mysql container yourself, f.e. from mysql:5.6 to mysql:5.7 and you are reusing the data volume with the mysql files.

When you check the startup logs you might see that mysql container is shutting down after startup because of an error like this:

Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it.

You can run the upgrade command in the container:

docker exec -it mysql_container_name bash -c "mysql_upgrade -uroot -proot"

Or simply delete the volume and recreate it.
Note: the data will unfortunatly be lost. So better dump the data before deleting the volume and reimport it.
In my case its no problem because im starting a new project anyway.

To delete the volume you can:

docker volume rm <volume id>

Or just delete the data dir:

rm -rf ./data/mysql

Then restart your setup so the mysql container recreates the databases:

docker-compose up

and mysql is working again and the application is able to connect. :)

ERROR: for docker_myproject_phpmyadmin_1 Cannot start service mg_myproject_phpmyadmin: network 15dff95a23808fe9d14b3dae71c0daeaa8b274c90566baa5beff37f3738033b6 not found

For some reason the networks were deleted and docker-compose doesnt automatically recreate networks unless you tell so by forcing docker to recreate containers:

docker-compose up --force-recreate

Solution came from this issue:
https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/5745#issuecomment-370031631

Probably i have to explicitly declare the networks to prevent mixups between projects.
Though i thought this would not be necessary…

Update: Today i would rather use the IntelliJ Database Tool for Sqlite administration.

But since Adminer is a popular hacking target they introduced a feature that does not allow to run adminer without a password, out of the box.
Sqlite database usually runs without password and dang, workaround needed!

So we need to add a plugin to adminer that allows password-less login and extend the official Adminer Docker image to include the plugin.

We add a script that loads the official password-less-login plugin and copy it to the plugins-enabled folder of the Adminer image

login-password-less.php:

<?php
require_once('plugins/login-password-less.php');

/** Set allowed password
 * @param string result of password_hash
 */
return new AdminerLoginPasswordLess(
    $password_hash = password_hash("admin", PASSWORD_DEFAULT)
);

Dockerfile:

FROM adminer
USER root
COPY login-password-less.php /var/www/html/plugins-enabled/login-password-less.php
#USER adminer # we run as root because of permissions problems on db file with the volume

In docker-compose.yml:

version: "3"
services:
  app:
    build: ./php
      - mailcatcher
    volumes:
      - "../:/app:rw"
      - "./php/cli/php.ini:/etc/php/7.3/cli/php.ini:ro"
      - "./php/fpm/php.ini:/etc/php/7.3/fpm/php.ini:ro"

  nginx:
    build: ./nginx
    depends_on:
      - app
    command: /bin/sh -c "nginx -g 'daemon off;'"
    volumes:
      - "..:/app:rw"
      - ./nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro
    ports:
      - '8088:80'

  adminer:
    build: ./adminer
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - "..:/app:rw"
    ports:
      - 8080:8080

File tree:

• adminer
  – Dockerfile
  – login-password-less.php
• nginx
  …
• php
  …
• docker-compose.yml

Note that since docker-compose.yml version 3 the volumes_from directive was removed in favor of top level volumes to share volumes across images. However this implementation is imho rather weird, so i jut duplicated the volumes declaration in the App container and Adminer container.
Feels rather wrong but thats all i could come up with. Any advice here is welcome.

Now that this is done we can open the Sqlite3 database with the pseudo-password “admin” and manage the database.

After all you could also just copy the one-file Adminer with plugin to the php container and run it from within the php container. Just adjust your Nginx config to allow calling the file directly and take care to not deploy Adminer to live.
There is also a project that bundles the plugin with Adminer to one file: https://github.com/FrancoisCapon/LoginToASqlite3DatabaseWithoutCredentialsWithAdminer/blob/master/build-adminer-4-sqlite3-into-one-file.sh