Customizations¶

This page describes how administrators can customize the configuration of a given SeaTable installation while ensuring that future upgrades stay seamless.

Context¶

The .yml files included in the artifact that is downloaded during the installation process already contain environment: blocks for the most important configuration settings. These are listed here.

If you need to modify any of these settings, it is sufficient to set/modify these variables directly inside your .env file. There's no need to modify the .yml files in order to adjust these settings.

The .yml files included in the release artifact should never be modified since any changes made will be overwritten when following the upgrade guide. This is caused by the fact that the .yml files in your /opt/seatable-compose directory are essentially replaced by the .yml files from the release artifact of the SeaTable version that you're upgrading to.

Mechanism¶

In order to configure additional settings that are not listed on the overview page, you can (and should) create an additional custom-seatable-server.yml file that only contains the customizations that are relevant to your installation. This has numerous benefits:

This file is not overwritten during the upgrade process
You do not introduce redundancy (i.e. that would be caused by copying the existing seatable-server.yml with all of its configuration settings)
All of the customizations made are easily visible inside a single file

Simply follow the steps below:

Step 1¶

Create custom-seatable-server.yml inside /opt/seatable-compose on the host.

The most minimal version of this file looks like this:

services:
    seatable-server:

Step 2¶

Add custom-seatable-server.yml to the COMPOSE_FILE variable inside your .env file.

Example:

A minimal SeaTable installation contains the following line inside the .env file (located at /opt/seatable-compose/.env):

COMPOSE_FILE='caddy.yml,seatable-server.yml'

Now simpli add custom-seatable-server.yml to the list of filenames that should be merged by Docker Compose. Additional filenames should be separated by a comma.

COMPOSE_FILE='caddy.yml,seatable-server.yml,custom-seatable-server.yml'

Step 3¶

Apply the changes by running the following command inside a terminal:

cd /opt/seatable-compose
docker compose up -d

Docker Compose will merge all of the files specified inside the COMPOSE_FILE variable and restart all services whose configuration has changed. This has an additional advantage: If a service's definition has not changed, it won't be unnecessarily restarted.

Examples¶

Adding an Environment Variable¶

If you need to configure an additional environment variable that is not included in seatable-server.yml by default, you can achieve this by adding the following block inside custom-seatable-server.yml:

services:
  seatable-server:
    environment:
      - API_GATEWAY_BASE_API_LIMIT_PER_MINUTE=1000

Adding a Volume Mount¶

If you need to mount an additional file/directory (e.g. a custom NGINX config file) into the seatable-server container, you can achieve this by adding the following block inside custom-seatable-server.yml:

services:
  seatable-server:
    volumes:
      - ./custom-seatable-nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Troubleshooting¶

If the merging does not work as expected, you can use docker compose config to print the result of the internal merging to the console. Since this can cause quite a lot of output depending on the number of installed components, you can dump this into a file instead and open this inside a text editor:

docker compose config > /tmp/seatable-compose-config.yml

Note: /tmp/seatable-compose-config.yml will contain secret values since the docker compose config command prints the result of the configuration merging algorithm after all variables have been interpolated.

Additional Resources¶

You can read more about the way multiple configuration files are merged together in the Compose file reference.