This provides a way to quickly launch one or more instances of a fully-ready AzerothCore database. It is particularly useful for testing/development purposes.

For example, with this you can quickly create a new, clean instance of the AzerothCore DB. Or create multiple instances each one available on a different port (that can be handy to test & compare things).

Instances (containers) can be easily set up and then destroyed, so you can always switch to a clean state after your experiments. Every instance will have the three acore_auth, acore_characters and acore_world mysql databases.

NOTE: you do not need to install any mysql-server manually in your system and if you already have it, the docker instances will not interfere with it.

If you just want to install the whole AzerothCore quickly using Docker Compose, we recommend following this guide instead.

Setup & usage instructions

Requirements

The only requirement is Docker. You can install it on any operating system.

Building the container image

To build the container image you have to be in the main folder of your local AzerothCore sources directory.

If you don't have the AzerothCore sources, clone it using:

git clone https://github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk.git

and cd into it cd azerothcore-wotlk.

You can build the image using:

docker build -t azerothcore/database -f docker/database/Dockerfile .

Note: the version of your DB will be the one of your sources when you built the image. If you want to update it, just update your sources (git pull) and build the image again.

For more information about the docker build command, check the docker build doc.

How to launch a container

Run the following command to launch a container:

docker run --name ac-database \
   -p 127.0.0.1:3306:3306 \
   -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password \
   --network ac-network \
   azerothcore/database

Where:

--name is followed by a container name like ac-database. Put whatever name you like, each container should have an unique name.

-p (port) is followed by IP_ADDRESS:EXTERNAL_PORT:INTERNAL_PORT.

INTERNAL_PORT must always be 3306.
EXTERNAL_PORT is the port that you will use to access the mysql-server from outside docker

--network takes the name of the internal docker network. Containers must be on the same network to communicate to each other.

NOTE: You may want to use an external port different than 3306 in case you have already mysql-server installed in your system (or some other service that is using that port). So you can use for example port 9000 with -p 127.0.0.1:9000:3306

docker run --name ac-database -p 9000:3306 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password azerothcore/database

-e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password lets you change the default password for the root user.

azerothcore/database will be the name of your docker image.

When the container is ready, you will see a message similar to:

Version: '5.7.24' socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' port: 3306 MySQL Community Server (GPL)

You can optionally pass option -d to detach the container run from your terminal.

You can optionally pass option -it to run the container as an interactive process (so you can kill it with ctrl+c).

For more information about the docker run command, check the docker run doc.

Launching more instances

You can easily run more instances. You just have to specify a different name and port for each.

Example: I want to launch three instances of the AzerothCore databases, each one listening respectively on port 9001, 9002 and 9003. I can do it with the following commands:

docker run --name ac-database-1 -p 127.0.0.1:9001:3306 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -d azerothcore/database docker run --name ac-database-2 -p 127.0.0.1:9002:3306 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -d azerothcore/database docker run --name ac-database-3 -p 127.0.0.1:9003:3306 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password -d azerothcore/database

You can use the docker ps command to check your running containers.

For more information about the docker ps command, check the docker ps doc.

Stopping / removing

You can stop a container using docker stop name-of-the container, for example docker stop ac-database-1.

You can then remove the container using docker rm name-of-the container, for example docker rm ac-database-1.