Django with Docker: Build an Image
By Rayed
Docker is an interesting technology, although still young it gained a lot of buzz and momentum.
The last couple of weeks I started playing with Docker to see how can I use it for Django project development and deployment.
Bootstrap Django
The main idea of bootstraping a Django project using Docker is to avoid installing any software other than Docker on your development machine, so no need for Linux virtual machine or Python!
So we will start with an generic Python container image and install what we need and test it before building our own custom image.
mkdir docker-django && cd docker-django
docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/app -p 8000:8000 python:3.6 bash
# --rm # Remove container after finishing bootstrapping
# -it # Interactive Mode
# -v $PWD:/app # Mount current directory to /app
# -p 8000:8000 # Expose port 8000 as 8000
cd /app
pip install django
pip freeze > requirements.txt
django-admin startproject apps
sed -i.bak 's/^ALLOWED_HOSTS.*/ALLOWED_HOSTS = ["*"]/' apps/apps/settings.py
./apps/manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
By mounting the current directory to /app (-v $PWD:/app) we insure that all the files we generate inside the container will be stored outside it, so we can use it when we build our own custom conatiner.
We also exposed port 8000 (-p 8000:8000) so we can access our Django app from the development machine.
Custom Image
Now that we have our requirements.txt file and our Django app directory apps, we can build our own custom image.
We start with our Dockerfile:
FROM python:3.6
ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1
COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
EXPOSE 8000
CMD ["python", "./apps/manage.py", "runserver", "0.0.0.0:8000"]
Then we build the image using the command:
docker build -t my-dj-image .
and that’s it we can start our new container using the following command:
docker run --name my-dj-container --rm -p 8000:8000 my-dj-image
We give the new instance a name my-dj-container container so we can access it by name later instead of trying to find its ID.
Here are some other commands that I found useful for your container:
# Mount /app to current directory to change the code
docker run --name my-dj-container --rm -p 8000:8000 -v $PWD:/app my-dj-image
# -d Detach, i.e. run in the background
docker run --name my-dj-container --rm -p 8000:8000 -v $PWD:/app -d my-dj-image .
# Run an extra commands on a running instance 'my-dj-container'
docker exec -it my-dj-container /app/apps/manage.py migrate
docker exec -it my-dj-container /app/apps/manage.py createsuperuser