The goal of my “Getting Started” tutorial is to have a TYPO3 Neos installation running within Docker containers on Mac OS X. There are several tutorials and repositories available to achieve this (see Resources further down), I decided to use the Million 12 TYPO3 Neos Docker image. We will use the Neos Demo Site provided by the Neos Team as our example website. Since it is recommended to use this site package as a starting point for your own Neos projects, you not only have a “Dummy Site” at the end but a working Neos environment for your own projects.

1. Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you have VirtualBox installed on your machine. If not, you can download the application here.

2. Download and install Boot2Docker

Download the installation package for Boot2Docker. This will give you a .pkg file that you can double-click for installation. Once the installation has finished, you have a new Application Applications folder called boot2docker.app. Double-click this app and a Terminal window (the Boot2Docker command line) will open up showing you the status of the boot process. Once you see something like bash-3.2$ you are ready to go.

3. Launching the Docker container for the database

Following the README instructions from the Million 12 TYPO3 Neos Docker image, the next step is launching a Docker Container for the database with which we want to run our Neos Demosite. Within the Boot2Docker command line run the following command:

docker run -d --name=db --env="MARIADB_PASS=my-pass" million12/mariadb

make sure to replace my-pass with the password that you want the root user of MariaDB to have (for those of you who do not know MariaDB: it is an open source clone of MySQL). If you see something like 6c46a83d..... in your terminal window, it worked!

4. Launching the Docker container for TYPO3 Neos

The next step is to launch the Docker container in which the application itself - TYPO3 Neos in our case - is running. Therefore run the following command in the Boot2Docker command line:

docker run -d --name=neos -p=8080:80 --link=db:db --env="T3APP_VHOST_NAMES=neos.docker dev.neos.docker" million12/typo3-neos

Compared to the ‘original command’ I adapted the names for the Neos vhosts, since I have several Neos instances running in other VMs and natively on the Mac.

5. Creating vhost entries for the Neos vhosts

Boot2Docker creates a virtual machine and assigns an IP address to it. To find out, which IP address you got, run the following command from your Mac command line (not from the Boot2Docker command line!)

$ boot2docker ip
192.168.59.103

Copy this IP address and then edit your /etc/hosts file on your Mac to create an IP mapping for your Neos vhost. First open the file with

sudo nano /etc/hosts

then add a new line like this (where 192.168.59.103 is the IP address you determined before):

192.168.59.103		neos.docker dev.neos.docker

Quit Nano by pressing CTRL + X and type Y and ENTER to save the changes. Test your configuration by running ping neos.docker.

6. Working with Neos

You should now be able to open

in a browser on your Mac.

Next steps

For me the next steps would be to figure out, how to deploy the Neos container to another server, e.g. a Staging server or a Production server. I will cover this topic in another blog post as soon as I gathered enough knowledge to write about it.

Further Resources