Running a simple Django website in Docker

Docker is a near perfect solution for having project portability across a wide variety of host platforms. I use docker to run my websites on both development computers and servers. For Django my go to Dockerfile looks a little something like this.

A few notes on my choices:

This assumes you are just using an sqlite database but this can easily scale into using PostgreSQL in coordination with docker-compose
I use webpack to build all of my static files on all of my sites hence why nodejs and yarn are included
Chromium is used in most of my projects for generating PDFs and screenshots, I've found it the most reliable and consistent way of handling that functionality

You could remove Chromium and save ~400MB of space on a roughly ~450MB image if you have no use for it. It is by far the largest dependency here. I also often use docker-compose in conjunction with this Dockerfile.

# alpine-django
#
# I create a `.env` file in the same folder as my `Dockerfile` and
# `docker-compose.yml` file with the environmental variables below. Generally my
# server file struction is `/srv/git/app` for the git bare repository,
# `/srv/docker/app` for the git repo cloned from the bare repo, and
# `/srv/data/app` for the data directory mounted to the container.
#
# The ports are `8000:8000` because I often use Caddy or Nginx to reverse proxy
# to the container. You could probably just serve the app directly though with
# `8000:80` instead if you have no media files.

version: "3"

services:
  web:
    container_name: analytics
    build: .
    volumes:
      - /srv/data/app/:/data/
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    command: gunicorn analytics.asgi:application -k uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker -b :8000 --log-file - --access-logfile - --error-logfile -
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE: ${DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE}
      DJANGO_SECRET_KEY: ${DJANGO_SECRET_KEY}
      DJANGO_BASE_URL: ${DJANGO_BASE_URL}

This can be used directly in production pretty well however I do put most of my websites behind Caddy using a reverse proxy. If you'd like to see my most up-to-date alpine-docker files you can check them out on my overshard/dockerfiles GitHub project.