Running Multiple Instances

[amxmln]

Hi there! I’m looking to migrate from Umami to Ackee and since I’m also hosting analytics for a friend and wouldn’t want their data to pollute mine in the overview (and not share my credentials with them), I was thinking of running two instances of Ackee in parallel as stated in the FAQ.

Would you be able to provide a bit more guidance on how to do that?

Ideally I’d like to be able to:

• Have a single Ackee folder with the most recent version
• Two sets of .env files with the configuration information for each instance
• Start and stop both instances at the same time when doing maintenance

You mention that both instances can connect to the same MongoDB – how does Ackee know which data to show in which instance in that case?

Thank you for your library and time. 🎉

[electerious]

You can start multiple instances of Ackee using Docker compose. Here's an example of the relevant docker-compose.yml part:

  ackee_one:
    image: electerious/ackee
    container_name: ackee_one
    restart: always
    environment:
      - WAIT_HOSTS=mongo:27017
      - ACKEE_MONGODB=mongodb://mongo:27017/ackee_one
      - ACKEE_PORT=80
      - ACKEE_USERNAME=username
      - ACKEE_PASSWORD=password
    depends_on:
      - mongo
    networks:
      - isolated_nw
  ackee_two:
    image: electerious/ackee
    container_name: ackee_two
    restart: always
    environment:
      - WAIT_HOSTS=mongo:27017
      - ACKEE_MONGODB=mongodb://mongo:27017/ackee_two
      - ACKEE_PORT=80
      - ACKEE_USERNAME=username
      - ACKEE_PASSWORD=password
    depends_on:
      - mongo
    networks:
      - isolated_nw
  mongo:
    image: mongo:4.4
    container_name: mongo
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - /srv/mongo/data:/data/db
    networks:
      - isolated_nw

The instances know how to keep the data separated, because they don't share the same connection URI (mongodb://mongo:27017/ackee_one vs mongodb://mongo:27017/ackee_two).

I hope that helps! :)

[amxmln]

Thank you for your quick reply! Unfortunately, using Docker is not an option on my server. But I guess I could spin up two different instances of Ackee by passing the environment variables directly in a script. 🤔

The most important bit was that you do in fact need two separate Mongo databases (ackee_one and ackee_two). Maybe that’s a little misleading in the FAQ – you can use the same MongoDB instance, but you need two different databases, right?

[electerious]

That's right!

Spinning up multiple instances without Docker isn't a problem. You can pull the project twice and create a different .env file in each folder: https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/master/docs/Get%20started.md#without-docker

Or just pull it once and start it twice with different envs :)

[amxmln]

Yeah I’d like to avoid pulling it twice—I’ll see what I can come up with and maybe we could add a solution to the docs for future reference. 👍

Thank you for your pointers!