Hello OFBiz Community, I could not find any official documentation covering free-tier cloud deployment of OFBiz, so I started exploring on my own and ran into a few issues I'd like community input on.
--- What I Tried — Railway Deployment: I attempted deployment on Railway (https://railway.app) using the Dockerfile included in the OFBiz 24.09.07 source. The build failed with the following errors specific to Railway's BuildKit implementation: - '--mount=type=cache,id=gradle-cache,sharing=locked,target=/root/.gradle' is missing the cacheKey prefix (Lines 37, 53) - '--mount=type=bind,from=builder,source=/builder/build/distributions/ofbiz.tar' — bind mounts from builder stage not supported (Line 81) - VOLUME directive not supported on Railway (Lines 120, 121, 130, 131) I created a simplified Dockerfile variant to work around these incompatibilities. The build progressed further but hit a second error — the Gradle build ran from stale cache layers, meaning ofbiz.tar was never actually generated: failed to compute cache key: "/builder/build/distributions/ofbiz.tar": not found Railway's free tier also only provides 1GB RAM which may be insufficient for OFBiz to start reliably. --- Key Finding — Missing docker/ Files in Release Zip: While investigating, I found that the OFBiz 24.09.07 zip downloaded from the official mirror is missing the docker/ directory contents entirely. The Dockerfile references: COPY --chmod=555 docker/docker-entrypoint.sh docker/send_ofbiz_stop_signal.sh . COPY --chmod=444 docker/disable-component.xslt . COPY --chmod=444 docker/templates templates None of these files exist in the downloaded zip. This would cause any Docker build to fail at the COPY step regardless of platform. --- Questions: 1. Is Docker support only available via Git clone and not from the official zip release? Or is this a packaging issue with 24.09.07? 2. Is there a recommended free or low-cost cloud platform where OFBiz can be reliably deployed for testing? 3. Is there a BuildKit-compatible Dockerfile variant available, or a recommended approach for platforms like Railway/Render? 4. What is the minimum RAM required for a basic OFBiz 24.09.07 containerized instance? 5. Is building the image locally and pushing to Docker Hub a more reliable approach than cloud-side builds? 6. How are database credentials typically passed as environment variables at runtime given that entityengine.xml is a static file? Is this handled by docker-entrypoint.sh? --- OFBiz Version: 24.09.07 (official mirror zip) Java: Eclipse Temurin JDK 17 OS: Windows 11 GitHub: https://github.com/muneebatahir987-hub/apache-ofbiz-24 If any community member has successfully deployed OFBiz on a free or low-cost cloud platform, a brief summary or pointer to any existing guide would be invaluable. Thank you. Muneeba Tahir [email protected]
