This reference setup guides users through the setup based on `docker-compose`, but the installation
of `docker-compose` is out of scope of this documentation. To install `docker-compose` itself, follow
the official [install instructions](https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/).
## Basics
The most simple setup just creates a volume and a network and starts the `gitea/gitea:latest-rootless`
image as a service. Since there is no database available, one can be initialized using SQLite3.
Create a directory for `data` and `config` then paste the following content into a file named `docker-compose.yml`.
Note that the volume should be owned by the user/group with the UID/GID specified in the config file. By default Gitea in docker will use uid:1000 gid:1000. If needed you can set ownership on those folders with the command: `sudo chown 1000:1000 config/ data/`
If you don't give the volume correct permissions, the container may not start.
For a stable release you could use `:latest-rootless`, `:1-rootless` or specify a certain release like `:{{< version >}}-rootless`, but if you'd like to use the latest development version then `:dev-rootless` would be an appropriate tag.
In addition to the environment variables above, any settings in `app.ini` can be set or overridden with an environment variable of the form: `GITEA__SECTION_NAME__KEY_NAME`. These settings are applied each time the docker container starts. Full information [here](https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/tree/main/contrib/environment-to-ini).
These environment variables can be passed to the docker container in `docker-compose.yml`. The following example will enable an smtp mail server if the required env variables `GITEA__mailer__FROM`, `GITEA__mailer__HOST`, `GITEA__mailer__PASSWD` are set on the host or in a `.env` file in the same directory as `docker-compose.yml`:
```bash
...
services:
server:
environment:
- GITEA__mailer__ENABLED=true
- GITEA__mailer__FROM=${GITEA__mailer__FROM:?GITEA__mailer__FROM not set}
- GITEA__mailer__MAILER_TYPE=smtp
- GITEA__mailer__HOST=${GITEA__mailer__HOST:?GITEA__mailer__HOST not set}
- GITEA__mailer__PASSWD="""${GITEA__mailer__PASSWD:?GITEA__mailer__PASSWD not set}"""
```
To set required TOKEN and SECRET values, consider using gitea's built-in [generate utility functions](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/command-line/#generate).