A basic Dockerfile for django-microservice API.

Purpose

If you are building microservice APIs using Django, this Dockerfile might be helpful, as it provides the very basics needed to run such a microservice API. This includes an Apache-webserver, stripped down to run only Python and Django, based on CentOS. The server has some security-enhancements in place, also.

The docker process will launch only Apache on start. Apache will launch as non-root, listening on port 8080.

In your project's Dockerfile, you can specify a volume that should be mounted, containing, for instance, all the secrets that the microservice needs to operate.

For instance:

VOLUME ["/var/www/api/code/api/settings/secrets/"]

You will also need to add a configuration-file for Apache, so that a virtual-host will be recognized and your Python code will actually run when the Apache-server is called appropriately:

ADD docker-files/*.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/

See examples/apache-vhost.conf for an example Apache-configuration file. See also èxamples/Dockerfile-example.txtfor an example Dockerfile that depends on the current one. Be careful when you edit those files; every line is critical. Be especially careful when you edit apache-vhost.conf, make sure that the path to the wsgi.py file is correct.

The examples assume that the base-directory for the microservice is in /var/www/api, with the code available at /var/www/api/code. You might want to keep it that way, to have some kind of similarity between microservices, and to make deployment based on the examples easier.

To catch the log-files the Apache-server creates, you will have to mount /etc/httpd/logs/ into a file-system on the Docker-host, and then harvest the files. Make sure that Apache is able to write into this filesystem. You can also override the log-configuration, of course.

Building

To create the docker-image, run

cd ~/build

git clone ...

docker build -t django-microservice-api-base django-microservice-api-base

You can then base your Dockerfiles on this one, by including a line like this:

FROM django-microservice-api-base

Running

After creating your own Docker-image, you can launch it like this:

docker run --volume=/home/docker/data/yourimage/logs/:/etc/httpd/logs/ -d -t yourimage