Installing Castopod with Docker And Things Missing from Directions

July 15, 2023

I decided it was time for me to write another blog post, though this one is not going to be as long as the others I've written (hopefully). This was a problem that I had been working on for at least a month on and off, which required opening a ticket with Castopod, searching the internet endlessly, and finally consulting ChatGPT to make suggestions. Eventually, I realized what was going wrong.

Installing Castopod

This tutorial is designed around hosting #castopod on an Ubuntu server while using #docker as my method of running it. I utilized the automatic server installation of Docker that comes as an option when installing a server, but I also had to run:

sudo apt-get install docker-compose -y

to also get the other portion needed on the server.

Once you've got that on, go ahead and follow the instructions on the main website:

https://docs.castopod.org/getting-started/docker.html

Once that is done, two possible things will happen. When you go to localhost/cp-install, you'll either see the super user creation screen, or you’ll be greeted by a warning that the program was not able to connect to your SQL database. In the logs, you might see:

castopod-db | 2023-07-14  0:04:00 4 [Warning] Access denied for user 'castopod'@'172.27.0.3' (using password: YES)
castopod-app |
castopod-app | [CodeIgniter\Database\Exceptions\DatabaseException]
castopod-app |
castopod-app | Unable to connect to the database.
castopod-app | Main connection [MySQLi]: Access denied for user '****'@'172.27.0.3' (using password: YES)
castopod-app | at SYSTEMPATH/Database/BaseConnection.php:418

This is where I got really stuck. I spent almost a month scouring the internet, creating a ticket, closing it after two weeks, then creating a new one about the same issue appearing in the Docker installation.

The Castopod developers did not get back to me (which is fine—I understand it's supported by volunteers). So I decided to consult ChatGPT based on the information I had, and it made suggestions that actually fixed the issue.

If you get this issue where the database can't connect due to “access denied,” you'll need to run the following commands:

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock

Once that is done, clear out the previously created volumes and start up again:

docker-compose down --volumes --remove-orphans
docker-compose up -d

Once you've done that, you should be good to go!

Ending

I know that generative #AI is still a hot-button topic in the #infosec world, but I believe it can be used for good to help solve issues. I wanted to showcase how it helped me find an answer and saved the developers a lot of time and effort.

Of course, I'm not going to opine on AI here in this small article, but I wanted to be upfront about how it helped and how it can benefit the #selfhosting community when it comes to issues like this in Castopod.

Until next time!