2.3.1 Start Colmena

Initilise the platform

The Colmena platform is now configured and is ready to be started. There are three ways to start the services. In test mode, in offline mode and in production mode. By default the platform is started in production mode. This requires a three FQDN and an email adress with SMTP support.

# Starts the platform in production mode
$ colmena init

If you are planing to run Colmena on a private network without access to the internet, you can use the offline mode. As you probably won’t be able to send emails o use a valid FQDN, the platform runs on a port and uses Mailcrab as an SMTP server. This information will be available when the platform starts.

# Starts the platform in offline mode
$ colmena init -m offline

If you still do not own an SMTP server you can run Colmena in test mode, and check emails are sent to a test service that is available at the domain you configured for SMTP_SERVER_URL.

# Starts the platform in test mode
$ colmena init -m test

The first time you run colmena init, docker will start downloading images for each service. On further initialisations no new image will be downloaded, unless needed by docker compose.

Note on initialization: Colmena uses caddy to automatically fetch and renew ssl certificates. If you initialize service too many times, the certificates service (letsencrypt) will start rejecting certificate validation requests and this may prevent services to be exposed by caddy. One can do so by checking the reverse proxy logs docker logs colmena_reverse_proxy.
To workaround this problem just temporarily rename your domains. For example, use: backoffice1 instead of backoffice.

And that’s it! After a few seconds you should be able to visit the applications from your browser. Based on the examples above, the services should be available in this fashion:

Backoffice: The backend application to access the platform management modules will be available at https://backoffice.colmena.company.tech
Web application: The colmena frontend application, available at https://colmena.company.tech
Nextcloud: the storage management for Colmena assets and media, available at https://nextcloud.colmena.company.tech
SMTP test server: (available only when running colmena in test mode). An application to test emails delivery, available at https://mail.colmena.company.tech

Stop the platform

The Colmena services can be stopped using the colmena stop command. If you started the services in test or offline mode, you should stop them using the flag: colmena stop -m test or .colmena stop -m offline

Then they can be initialised at any time using the command shown previously colmena init.