This page is part of my digital garden. It is more like a notebook entry than a polished blog post. It’s a space where I document learnings primarily for my own reference, yet share them in case they benefit others. Unlike my blog posts, these pages are works-in-progress and updated over time. Like tending to a real garden, I periodically refine its content. I welcome suggestions for improvements at dries@buytaert.net.

For Drupal developers, Activepieces makes it easy to connect Drupal to other systems. Think of it as an open source alternative to tools like Zapier or n8n, but with an MIT license.

For example, you can create a workflow that runs when new content is published in Drupal and automatically sends it to Slack, Google Sheets, or social media. You can also trigger Drupal actions, such as creating new content or updating user data, when something changes in Salesforce, GitHub, or Airtable.

This guide covers running Activepieces locally using Docker. This setup is ideal if you’re developing Drupal sites locally with DDEV and want to build workflows that connect to your local Drupal instance.

When you develop Drupal sites locally, Activepieces Cloud can’t reach them. You could use a tunneling service like ngrok to expose your local environment to the internet, but that adds extra complexity.

Instead, we can run an open source copy of Activepieces locally using Docker. This gives you a fully configured Activepieces instance that can communicate directly with your local Drupal site. You can get up and running in just a few minutes with a single command.

Contributing to the Drupal Piece

In Activepieces, a Piece is an integration that connects to an external application or service. I helped build the original Drupal Piece, which now ships with Activepieces out of the box. It lets you create workflows that move data between Drupal and other applications.

If you want to contribute to the Drupal Piece, this Docker setup is not what you need. The Docker instance runs like a production environment. It’s perfect for building and testing workflows in Activepieces, but it doesn’t let you modify the Activepieces code or the Drupal Piece itself.

To make changes to Activepieces, including the Drupal Piece, you’ll need to set up a full Activepieces development environment instead.

However, if your goal is simply to run Activepieces locally and connect it to your Drupal site, the Docker setup below is all you need.

Run Activepieces locally with Docker

This one-line command will download and run Activepieces on your computer:

docker run -d -p 8080:80 -v ~/.activepieces:/root/.activepieces -e AP_QUEUE_MODE=MEMORY -e AP_DB_TYPE=SQLITE3 -e AP_FRONTEND_URL="http://localhost:8080" activepieces/activepieces:latest

This pulls the latest Activepieces image from Docker Hub (if it isn’t already cached) and starts a container with the following settings:

• Runs in detached mode (-d)
• Maps port 8080 on your computer to port 80 in the container
• Persists data by mounting ~/.activepieces to the container
• Uses in-memory queue processing and SQLite database
• Sets the frontend URL to http://localhost:8080

This might take a couple of minutes to boot up the container and get Activepieces up and running. After a couple of minutes, navigate to http://localhost:8080 (not https) to create an account and log into your local instance.

To start using Activepieces with your Drupal site, you still need to connect them. See my guide on connecting Drupal with Activepieces.

Upgrading the Activepieces Docker container

Activepieces regularly releases new versions. The Docker instance on your local machine does not update itself automatically, so you’ll want to manually upgrade it from time to time.

First, list your running containers to find the container ID for Activepieces:

docker ps

Next, stop that container by replacing <container-id> with the actual ID you found:

docker stop <container-id>

Finally, pull the latest Activepieces image from Docker Hub:

docker pull activepieces/activepieces:latest

Start a new container using the same docker run command from above. Your flows and settings remain intact because they’re stored in the mounted ~/.activepieces directory.