Dockerize Django application

Posted by Adarshreddy Adelli

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Hey there! I am very excited to write on one of my personal favourites ie: docker. Nowadays there is a huge buzz for docker among the developers because it eased the production of the software we build. For this post, I will be using the music api which was built with Django, Django REST Framework(DRF) in our previous posts.

Why docker?

Docker maintains standardization of the deployment environment. Software today adopting complex configurations with frameworks and architectures. Your deployment environment may be unfriendly due to its mismatch with the dependencies that are well suited to your development machine. Simply a thing that works with Ubuntu may not work with Arch.

Docker vs Virtual Machines

Virtual machines run your software like a separate computer whereas docker shares the host environment. The image below provides a better understanding of docker and virtual machine.

credits: docker

Now let's Dockerize

We need to specify steps to build our image using Dockerfile. It is a simple set of commands organised to perform our building. In your root folder where manage.py exists add this Dockerfile

	# official Python runtime as a parent image
	FROM python:3.6
	# enviroment variables
	ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1
	# create root directory
	RUN mkdir /music_api
	# Set the working directory
	WORKDIR /music_api
	# Copy the current directory contents into the container at /music_api
	ADD . /music_api/
	# Install packages specified in requirements.txt
	RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

view raw Dockerfile hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now we will run our containerized application using docker-compose. Docker-compose is configured using .yml file

	#docker version
	version: '3'
	services:
	web:
	#this sets build directory
	build: .
	#making migrations and fire up server
	command: bash -c "python manage.py makemigrations && python manage.py migrate && python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000"
	container_name: music_api
	#mount source to container
	volumes:
	- .:/music_api
	ports:
	- "8000:8000"

view raw docker-compose.yml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now run your application using docker-compose up (127.0.0.1:8080). This aggregates all the running containers.

Thank you for reading!

Adarshreddy Adelli Tuesday, August 11, 2020 operating systems python