# Typesense and docker compose with SSL certificates

I needed fast and robust search for the website I'm working on [Affill.io](https://affill.io)

So I decided to go for the opensource tool Typesense, and I wanted to self host it.

I went for a small CX11 vps from Hetzner, and after following their guide on using [docker compose](https://typesense.org/docs/guide/install-typesense.html#docker-compose) I got it up and running. I dont have much data yet so the 2GB RAM is enough for now.

But I wanted to have my own domain for the search and get a SSL certificate from Let's encrypt.  
It's been a while since I worked with linux, but the excellent [howto from certbot](https://certbot.eff.org/) on how to get the certificate generated helped me get up and running.

Now all that was left was to get typesense to work with my certificates, I made the `docker-compose.yml` file and tried to start the container with `docker compose up -d`

But the server just kept on restarting

```bash
NAME                    IMAGE                        COMMAND                  SERVICE     CREATED          STATUS                        PORTS
typesense-typesense-1   typesense/typesense:0.25.2   "/opt/typesense-serv…"   typesense   41 seconds ago   Restarting (1) 1 second ago
```

I ran `docker compose logs` and could see that typesense couldnt find my certification files.

```bash
typesense-1  | E20240415 18:01:05.855815     1 http_server.cpp:1069] An error occurred while trying to load server certificate file: /cert/fullchain.pem
typesense-1  | E20240415 18:01:05.861860     1 http_server.cpp:175] Failed to listen on 0.0.0.0:8108 - No such file or directory
```

The error was that I tried to map the domain folder of letsencrypt

```bash
- /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.example.com:/cert
```

When mounting this folder the symlink wouldnt work, so I had to change the folder mount to be the /etc/letsencrypt folder instead.

This is my final docker-compose.yml file:

```bash
version: '3.4'
services:
  typesense:
    image: typesense/typesense:0.25.2
    restart: on-failure
    ports:
      - "443:8108"
    volumes:
      - ./typesense-data:/data
      - ./log:/log
      - /etc/letsencrypt:/cert
    command: '--data-dir /data --log-dir /log --enable-cors --ssl-certificate /cert/live/www.example.com/fullchain.pem --ssl-certificate-key /cert/live/www.example.com/privkey.pem
```

And now everything works!