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

MusicBrainz Picard identifies songs from *.mp3 files and automatically fixes metadata

In my first attempt to switch from streaming to move back to listening to *.mp3 files, one of the issues I encountered was organization: how to standardize the metadata of the songs? The solution I was familiar with at the time — manually editing each son…

via Manual do Usuário April 24, 2025

Google's control of the web could be coming to an end

It's been hard to avoid the US government's antitrust case against Meta lately, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent three days in front of the cameras in Congress, testifying about his company's alleged anti-competitive tactics. But another equall…

via The Torment Nexus April 24, 2025

$5 million in tokens stolen from ZKsync

An attacker compromised an admin account belonging to the ZKsync Ethereum layer-2 project, which is built by Matter Labs. By doing so, they were able to steal approximately $5 million worth of the ZK token, which the project said wer…

via Web3 is Going Just Great April 24, 2025

Generated by openring