Foreword

As of beginning 2016 the docker toolset is not quite there to provide a heroku like expierence when deploying to production. A lot of parts are already there, but have a few quirks that need to be adressed.

Because of that, the deployment strategy for djangopackages.org is a bit different from what you read in the getting started with docker tutorials.

First, we don’t use docker-machine. It’s not reliable and has no team of maintainers comparable to other distros like debian, ubuntu or rhel that manages security releases.

Second, there’s no way do daemonize the docker compose process. When the underlying VM is restarded, the stack won’t start automatically.

The current strategy is:

  • Use a virtual machine with a well patched OS (debian, ubuntu, RHEL), djangopackages.org is using

ubuntu 14.04 - Install docker, docker-compose, git and supervisord - Clone the code on the server - Let supervisord run it

Stack

The configuration in docker-compose.yml contains 4 services:

  • postgres that powers the database
  • django-a and django-b that runs the WSGI server and serves the app through gunicorn
  • caddy that proxies incoming requests to the gunicorn server
  • redis as cache

Server Provisioning

There’s a bootstrap script available, run:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pydanny/djangopackages/master/server_bootstrap.sh

This will install docker, docker-compose on ubuntu 14.04.

Backups

To create a backup, run:

docker-compose run postgres backup

To list backups, run:

docker-compose run postgres list-backups

To restore a backup, run:

docker-compose run postgres restore filename.sql

Backups are located at /data/djangopackages/backups as plain SQL files.

When Things Go Wrong

  • Is docker running?:

    service docker status

  • Is supervisor and both daemonized processes running?:

    supervisorctl status

  • Are all services running?:

    cd /code/djangopackages
docker-compose ps

  • Check the logs for all services:

    cd /code/djangopackages
docker-compose logs

  • Check the logs for individual services:

    cd /code/djangopackages
docker-compose logs postgres|django-a|django-b|caddy