A phpBB forum is a PHP application with:

• immutable source code
• mutable folders:
  • files/
  • stores/
  • ext/ (but this one could be considered as immutable too)
  • images/

If the path of those folders could be edited, we would build upon rSAASSVC, our library to map an host to a configuration.

But that's not the case, and it doesn't seem a good plan to share files and images.

Currently, we've phpBB installations for:

• Wolfplex (to offer as an archive?)
• Espace Win (archive)
• Utopia (archive)

There are all archives, as new live projects tend to use Discourse.

Plan is so to deploy the application immutable code as a Docker container, with the files/ stores/ and images/ folder mounted as volumes.

To update phpBB — new version or new extension — will mean to destroy containers and to relaunch them from update image.

MySQL will be provided by a single MySQL container shared by the different forum, here with its own database.

The backup will be as simple as save the assets from the mutable data folder, and to backup the databases.

To add a new forum, we only need to add a domain in the saas/phpBB pillar file, and a new container will be launched by the paas-docker role.

Target Docker engine is Equatower.