Ogre Codes

Maintaining consistent build environments between multiple development and staging servers can be a chore. Products like Fabric or Ansible work well for managing multiple permanent servers, but don't help much when you are building a test environment development system which requires some kind of VM layer. Docker presents a good solution for this kind of setup. You can build complete environments which are simple to deploy either on a test server or even on a MacBook or other laptop.

A while ago I put together an image for deploying Django with Docker for my team at BiomedGPS and it worked so well I decided I would rebuild it as an open source project. I've released the resulting image on GitHub.com/OgreCodes .

I've tried a few similar images out there, but most of them require you rebuild the image for fairly minor configuration changes. I've set this image up so you should only need to rebuild the image if you need to make changes to the Python environment via requirements.txt. You can deploy a complete Docker image with Django and Nginx serving static and media files, less than 10 minutes. Adding MySQL server instead of SQLLight increases the time by a couple minutes.

The other big thing which makes this image stand out is the step by step instructions on launching the image. If you are familiar with docker and django but have never put together an image, this should be very helpful. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.

If you use Django and you need a straight forward docker container, give it a spin and let me know what you think.