Docker for PEGA Personal Edition

Note: This project currently only supports Pega 8.3 personal edition (this might work with older verisons, but not guaranteed).

This project is intended to help PEGA enthusiasts deploy and experiment PEGA PRPC Personal Edition using docker.

This project has been tested against Pega PRPC Personal Edition 8.3 version on a Manjaro 5.3.15 host OS. Those of you who intend to run this on a windows host might have to do some additonal setup in your docker installation to support linux images(these are easily searchable on the internet). These modifications are not specific to this project, but something that has to be done to run linux based docker images on Windows host OS.

"Pega PRPC Personal Edition" will be refered to as "PEGA-PE" for the sake of simplicity in rest of the project & documentation.

Getting Started

Follow these instruction to setup PEGA-PE & backend Postgresql as docker containers.

Prerequisites

You would need the following requisites to use this project

Hardware Requirements

Memory : 4 GB minimum / 8 GB preferred

Active internet connection with decent speed. Installation dowloads around 500-700MB of data - and will vary from machine to machine based on the packages already installed and how up-to-date the machine is.

Atleast 5-7 GB of free disk space [most of which will be consumed by postgresl container volume]

Software Requirement

Host OS should have docker & docker-compose installed. This can be installed easily using the instructions below:

Install Docker

Install Docker Compose

OS Requirement

Though the project is tested on an Ubuntu flavour, docker builds should work the same on most host operating systems. Windows users will have to make some additional modifications to the docker installation to support linux images.

Files

PEGA PRPC Personal Edition zip file downloaded from PEGA website

• Pega.com > Support > Download Pega Software > Download Personal Edition
• Certain binaries from within this downloaded zip has to used to build & deploy PEGA-PE.

Build Docker Image

This project only provides you with a Dockerfile which can be used to build an image for yourself. Since the build includes using propreitary files provided by Pegasystems, this images shouldn't be hosted on a public platform or distributed to others without prior consent from Pegasystems.

1. Get the project

• Download / checkout this project to a suitable location in your hardrive and extract the contents.

• Rest of the instructions below are w.r.t the current folder location.

2. Prepare for docker image build of postgresql

• Extract the file pega.dump from PEGA-PE zip downloaded as mentioned in Files Prerequisite. For example, pega.dump can be located as 115148_PE_721.zip/data/pega.dump in PEGA-PE 7.2.1.

• Mention the location of pega.dump file in the file docker-compose.yml.

      volumes:
        - ${PEGA_DUMP}:/tmp/resources/  #substitue $  {PEGA_DUMP} with directory holding pega.dump file

  Instead of directly mentioning the location inside docker-compose.yml, a neater way will be to use an environment file. Create a new file ".env" and add the location for pega.dump inside "*.env"

  Content of .env file in my case is as below as i have extracted pega.dump to /home//DockerBuild/ resources/pega.dump

  PEGA_DUMP=/home/<user>/DockerBuild/resources/

• Pass username, password & db details to docker-compose.yml file. These details will be used to create the backend db, which will be used by PEGA-PE.

  environment:
        - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}  #   substitute .with db password
        - POSTGRES_USER=${POSTGRES_USER}  # substitute    with db user
        - POSTGRES_DB=${POSTGRES_DB}  # substitute with   db name

  again, the neater way will be to just include these too in the .env file

  POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
  POSTGRES_USER=postgres
  POSTGRES_DB=postgres
  PEGA_DUMP=/home/<user>/DockerBuild/resources/

  Important: Eventhough this project supports use of any username & password, the base image provided by Pegasystems has hardcoded username "postgres" inside one of the sql scripts. Because of this the username will have to be "postgres".

  Important: POSTGRES_DB value has be "postgres" because the contents in pega.dump file are specific to database postgres.

3. Prepare for docker image build of pega web app

• Extract the files prweb.war, prhelp.war from PEGA-PE zip downloaded as mentioned in Files Prerequisite. For example, these files can be located as 115148_PE_721.zip/PRPC_PE.jar/PersonalEdition.zip/tomcat/webapps in PEGA-PE 7.2.1.

• Place the files extracted on the previous step to Project_Root/PegaPRPC-WebApp/resources

• Download the jdbc driver from here and place in Project_Root/PegaPRPC-WebApp/resources/jdbc_drivers

4. Build docker images for postgresql & pega web app

• Run the below command to build the docker images for both postgresql & pega web app

  docker-compose build --no-cache

  This command will take some time to build the images based on your internet connection speed and your hardware specs. First time run will download the required base images from internet.

• Start only postgresql container because it on the first run that databases are created and pega.dump is restored back to postgresql

  docker-compose up postgresql-pega-backend

  This again will run for around 5-10mins. Make sure that the default drive used by docker has atleast 5GB of free space, as this step will restore pega.dump to postgresql.

  Important: this image uses mount volume in the base image. Hence eventhough the volumes are not explicitly mentioned in docker-compose.yml, the data is persisted between restarts

• Once the restore is complete, shutdown the docker instance by doing a Ctrl+C on the same terminal window that is running the docker instance or issuing the below command from a different terminal window

  docker-compose down postgresql-pega-backend

Start & Stop docker containers

1. Issue the below command to start both pega web app & postgresql and send to background

   docker-compose up -d

2. Issue the below command to stop both pega web app & postgresql

   docker-compose stop

Additional command references

If you have to re-build the image for postgresql with modified Dockerfile, you might notice that the stale image built previously is being picked again and again.

To force re-creating the container again use

docker-compose up --force-recreate postgresql-pega-backend

To remove all unused images use

docker system prune

To remove all unused volumes use the below. You will notice that multiple build & run will fill up your harddisk very fast. This is because of the approx.5GB volumes consumed by each build.

docker volume prune

Authors

• Kannan Raveendran Nair - Initial work - kannan-raveendran-nair

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. You are free to copy, modify & redistribute this code for non-commercial purposes.

Use of Pega Personal Edition itself is licensed by Pegasystems and licensing details can be found in the zip file downloaded in Prerequisites/Files