Docker in Windows

Normally, those kinds of things will be much more troublesome when you want to run them in Windows compare to in Linux. However, Docker has made quite user-friendly for Windows. You just need to run the Docker installer and to enable below two things, then Docker will work like a charm.

• Hyper-V
• Virtualization in BIOS

Docker Files

Create this file with the name Dockerfile and put into your Django project root folder.

# Use an official Python runtime as a parent image
FROM python:2.7-slim

# Set the working directory to /app
WORKDIR /app

# Copy the current directory contents into the container at /app 
ADD . /app

# Install any needed packages specified in requirements.txt
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

# Make port 80 available to the world outside this container
EXPOSE 80

# Define environment variable
ENV NAME MySite

# Run manage.py when the container launches
CMD ["python", "manage.py", "runserver", "0.0.0.0:80"]

You can define any required modules in requirements.txt, and you don’t need Python or anything in requirements.txt on your system, nor will building or running this image install them on your system.

mysqlclient

Build it

docker build -t mysite .

Run the app, mapping your machine’s port 8000 to the container’s EXPOSED port 80 using -p:

docker run -p 8000:80 mysite

Docker-Compose (To be completed)

Create a file called docker-compose.yml in your project directory and paste the following:

version: '3'

services:
  mariadb:
    image: mariadb
    environment:
       - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
       - MYSQL_DATABASE=docker
       - MYSQL_USER=user
       - MYSQL_PASSWORD=password
  web:
    build: .
    command: python manage.py runserver 0:80
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    ports:
      - "8000:80"
    depends_on:
      - mariadb

Docker Useful Commands

List dangling images:

docker images -f dangling=true

Remove dangling images:

docker rmi -f $(docker images -f dangling=true -q)

Running an empty container:

docker run -it mysite /bin/bash

Remove a container:

docker rm -f <container-id>

Remove all stopped containers

docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

Important for Windows Users and Using MySQL

You may use either docker or docker-compose to bring up your Django application, however, when in Windows and if you are using MySQL as DB, there will be an error ‘No modeul named MySQLdb’ and when you want to install mysqlclient or libmysqlclient-dev, there will be another error of mysql_config() not found. So in the end, I need to install the packages manually.

1. Run the image as container and then get into the container

   docker run -p 8000:8000 mysite
   docker exec -i -t <image name> /bin/bash

2. Run apt-get update in order to get all the packages

   apt-get update

3. install mysql-server for mysql_config()

   apt-get install mysql-server

4. install libmysqlclient-dev and gcc in order to install mysqlclient for MySQLdb

   apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
   apt-get install gcc
   pip install mysqlclient

5. If you need to import pycurl then you need to install the prerequisite packages

   apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev librtmp-dev
   pip install pycurl

6. Finally, You can run the application and access it in your browser!

   python manager.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

You could also save the changes to an image.

docker commit <container-id> <image-name>:<tag>