You're right, i will start working on Docker in few months.

Your proposal is very good, and here's still room for improvement.

After deployed load-balance iRedMail cluster (with Ansible) for customers, and move iRedMail installer from shell script to Ansible (not yet published), i found some tweaks required to get a better scaleable mail server and easier for sysadmin to maintain, it will split core config files and allow sysadmins to maintain their own modular config files without modifying those core config files maintained by iRedMail. I will roll out these changes one-by-one in iRedMail-1.0 and later releases.

SOGo uses memcached. But it doesn't support redis. So it's not our choice.

HAProxy is very easy to setup, it's also a good choice.

I may not have enough time for Docker soon, i'd like to know how we can work together to make it happen.

+1 for Docker! I would love to see the project become Docker-based or at least offer it as an option. With regards to the comments about SQL - I think that SQL support should still be kept and maintained along with LDAP, but perhaps only PostgreSQL? Surely there aren't people using MySQL in critical production environments?

My suggestion would be to use Debian 9 (Stretch) as the base image for the new Dockerfiles, iRedMail works very well on this platform - I use it myself.

If you're looking for help with this I've got a great deal of experience with Docker and Docker Compose/Swarm and would love to help out or offer guidance/advice any way I can.

Perhaps next week or after that I might be able to start prototyping something, with the services split between different containers where appropriate. I will need some time to examine the installation scripts for iRedMail in order to properly understand how it all works first.

I will keep you guys updated if I start work on anything!

@bmackay, please reach out to me via email <kane (AT) cute (DOT) im> if this is something you'd like to assist with. I'm confident enough with Docker as a tool, but iRedMail is quite an ambitious project to even just prototype.

Somewhat, I've created a blank project skeleton in a GitHub repository here:

https://github.com/kawaii/iredmail-docker
https://github.com/kawaii/iredmail-dock … ompose.yml

I don't tend to commit very often, so it is likely you might see long gaps of inactivity in the repository between my pushes. Though, I can commit more often and we can make PRs on various sections of the project if anyone would like to help out with this. I will still spend a lot more time just reading through the various installation scripts for iRedMail and deciding how best to split it up.

Users will use environment variables to set the hostname, port, user, password and database of the system they want to connect to. I can provide example docker-compose.yml files for both MySQL and PostgreSQL stacks too. The default will be a single PostgreSQL container, but advanced users are of course able to deploy their own cluster with multi-master replication and use the environment variables to tell iRedMail to use that cluster if they want to.

As you can see from the repository skeleton above, I plan to split as many of the components as possible into different containers, this is the purpose of Docker after all. One issue I forsee is with the Roundcube (and any other PHP things) is that it is impossible for PHP-FPM to serve static content from a pure PHP container over to the nginx container unless they share a volume, but that makes it Docker Swarm unfriendly, so Roundcube is likely one of the last components I decide to figure out. iRedAdmin itself is a Python application, so upstreaming to that service remotely over a network is possible by default.

Please feel free to either email me with suggestions or if you want to work on this with me I'm happy to give you any help too. Unfortunately I do work full-time during the day (GMT+0) so progress on this will be slow, so if at any time you wish to take over, please do so.

For php applications like Roundcube, you may have to run Nginx + php-fpm + application in one docker.

Good that I'm not the only one. I evaluated Mail Cow Dockerized last week and I feel handicapped. For me I don't want to master the Docker principles and I don't see advantages for normal usage.

I was just happy to find iRedMail as a normal server suite that just installs on a server. I dont want to run docker and maintain containers.

I don't see the hype or the advantage of running a mail server in Docker? What do I miss?