Dockerized PostgreSQL and Django for Local Development

| programming | devops | databases |

Docker and docker-compose make it dead simple to avoid dependency hell and have a consistent environment for your whole team while doing local development. This post walks through setting up a new Django project from scratch to use Docker and docker-compose. It is modeled after a previous post that I wrote about doing a similar thing with Laravel and MySQL.

Dockerfile

Nothing too interesting happening here. Installing python and pip. 
FROM ubuntu:16.04


  system update
  
    
      
      
    
  



RUN apt update
RUN apt upgrade -y



  python deps
  
    
      
      
    
  



RUN apt install -y python3-dev python3-pip

docker-compose.yml

version: '2'
services:
  app:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    working_dir: /app
    command: bash -c "pip3 install -r requirements.txt && python3 manage.py migrate && python3 manage.py runserver 0:8000"
    depends_on:
      - db
  db:
    image: postgres:9.6.5-alpine
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=feedread
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=feedread
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
With this in place you can start your Django app with docker-compose up. Each time the app starts it will install the latest dependencies, run migrations, and start serving the app on localhost:8000

Notes

  1. In order to do stuff with the database locally you should add the following record to your local /etc/hosts file 
    # /etc/hosts

    127.0.0.1 db

  2. Since we define - .:/app as a volume, this means that all of your local changes are immediately visible in the dockerized app.
  3. If you need to access the running app or db container you can do so with docker-compose exec app bash or docker-compose exec db bash.
  4. This docker-compose file is not really suitable for production since it is not likely that you would want to build the container each time the app starts or automatically run migrations.
  5. You can add additional services like memcached, a mail server, an app server, a queue, etc., using the same method that we are using above with our database.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026

Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle

Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…

via Information Overload April 2, 2026

The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026

Generated by openring