SMARTER-repository

The SMARTER data repository

Introduction

This guide describe how to set-up a working instance of SMARTER-repository. This project was developed in Django with docker-compose: you will require docker-compose in order to set-up and run your own copy of SMARTER-repository.

In this project there are directories that will be mounted as data volume: this will make easier to develop the code or re-spawn the docker application on another location using the same volume directory. For example, all MySQL data files will be placed in mysql-data directory and all django data will be placed in django-data directory inside this project. When such directories are created for the first time, there are created and mounted as a root directories. After permission can be fixed according user need. For example processes like nginx and uwsgi work with a different user from root, and so files need to be accessed at least in read mode

The docker-compose.yml file

Before starting, take a look in the docker-compose.yml file. This is the configuration file used by docker-compose commands. All docker-compose commands need to be instantiated in this directory or by specifying the path of docker-compose.yml file, as stated by the docker compose documentation. For such compose project, 3 containers will be instantiated:

db: This is the container of mariadb server. This container will listen for uwsgi django container
uwsgi: this is the django container in which uwsgi server will run. This container will be linked with db container
nginx: this container has nginx installed. All static files will be served by nginx by sharing static content as docker volumes between containers. Django files will be served by the appropriate container via uwsgi nginx plugin.

Those name will be placed in the /etc/hosts file in each container, so you can ping uwsgi host inside nginx container, for instance, no matter what ip addresses will be given to the container by docker. When starting this project for the first time, data directory and initial configuration have to be defined. Data directories will be placed inside this project directory, in order to facilitate docker-compose commands once docker images where configured for the application. When data directories are created for the first time, the ownership of such directories is the same of the service running in the container. You can change it according your needs, but remember that services run under a non privileged user, so you have to define at least the read privileged for files, and the read-execute privileges for directories.

Setting up .env variables

You can set variables like password and users using environment variables that could be passed on runtime or by env files. The default env file is a .env file placed inside django docker-composed root directory. This file MUST NOT be tracked using CVS

You should also store sensitive informations using docker secrets

Create a .env file inside project directory, and set the following variables:

DEBUG=True
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=<mysql password>
SECRET_KEY=<your django secret key>
MYSQL_DATABASE=smarter
MYSQL_USER=<django user>
MYSQL_PASSWORD=<django password>

Create the MySQL container

In order to download and start the MySQL container for the first time, simply type:

docker-compose up -d db

Once db container is instantiated for the first time, mysql-data content is created and MySQL is configured to have users and password as described in the .env file. After that, container could be destroyed and data will persists inside mysql-data directory. If you need extra stuff to be done after database creation, you could define sql and sh scripts inside a directory that need to be mounted in /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ as in the following example:

# to export volume, as recommended in https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/library/mysql/
volumes:
  - type: bind
    source: ./mysql-data/
    target: /var/lib/mysql

  - type: bind
    source: ./mysql-initdb/
    target: /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/
    read_only: true

Each script inside /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ directory will be executed after database creation. Once database is created, those scripts will not be executed anymore.

The MySQL container defined in docker-compose.yml never expose a port outside, but you may want to expose it to access data with a MySQL client. You can get a mysql client to this container using a db container, for instance:

docker-compose run --rm db sh -c 'mysql -h db --password="${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}"'

Dumping data from database

With the docker run command, you can do a smarter database dump:

docker-compose run --rm db /bin/sh -c 'mysqldump -h db -u root --password=$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD smarter' > dump.sql

Loading data in database

With the docker run command, you can import a .sql file by adding its path as a docker volume, for instance, if you are in smarter_dump.sql directory:

cat dump.sql | docker-compose run --rm db /bin/sh -c 'mysql -h db -u root --password=$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD smarter'

Access database using adminer

You can access to mysql container using adminer, you need to connect to docker composed instance using the same network, for example:

docker run -d --link smarter-repository-db-1:db -p 8080:8080 --name adminer --network django_default adminer

More information could be found in adminer - docker hub

Create django container

Django will be served using the uwsgi server. Dependencies are managed by poetry using the two files pyproject.toml and poetry.lock, which are tracked at the root level of this project folder: in order to correctly add these two files to your django container, the project root directory is added to the build context (see context in docker-compose documentation). To build the django container simply type:

docker-compose build uwsgi

You can get more information here:

How to use Django with uWSGI
Django and NGINX
uwsgi configuration

Manage dependencies

The simplest way to manage dependencies is to manage them using poetry: simply add a new dependency with:

poetry add <dependency>

Then update the poetry.lock using:

poetry install --no-root

This will install your packages in your local environment (not inside the docker container!). To update your local container you have to build again with:

docker-compose build uwsgi

Please see Managing dependencies in poetry documentation to have more information.

TODO: manage dependencies using docker containers

The django-data folder

The smarter_uwsgi.ini in django-data directory contains uwsgi configuration for this application. Remember that data file will be stored in smarter directory in containers, by the application will be accessible using smarter-repository URL location. If you want to modify the project directories, remember to modify docker-compose.yml and smarter_uwsgi.ini according your needs.

You may want to fix file permissions in order to edit files, for example:

sudo chown -R ${USER}:www-data django-data

The Django settings.py file

You may need to customize set a list of strings representing the host/domain names that this Django site can serve: you will modify the ALLOWED_HOSTS as described here. To avoid to store sensitive information inside settings.py, you may want to refer to python-decouple documentation. With this module, you can store sensitive information as environment variables or in another .env file that need to be placed in the sample directory of settings.py

from decouple import config

# ... other stuff

# SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret!
SECRET_KEY = config('SECRET_KEY')

# SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
DEBUG = config('DEBUG', cast=bool, default=False)

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']

The same applies for the database section of the configuration file:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': config('SMARTER_DATABASE'),
        'USER': config('SMARTER_USER'),
        'PASSWORD': config('SMARTER_PASSWORD'),
        'HOST': 'db',
        'PORT': 3306,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'init_command': "SET sql_mode='STRICT_TRANS_TABLES'",
        },
    }
}

Note that the db host is the same name used in docker-compose.yml. User, database and password are the same specified in the above. Remember to set the timezone: docker compose will export HOST /etc/localtime in read only mode, but it's better to set timezone also in django in order to have correct times:

TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Rome'

We have to set also the static file positions. It's better to prepend the django project names in order to write rules to serve static files via nginx. Here is an example for smarter project:

# Static files (CSS, JavaScript, Images)
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/howto/static-files/
STATIC_URL = '/smarter-repository/static/'
MEDIA_URL  = '/smarter-repository/media/'

# collect all Django static files in the static folder
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "static"
MEDIA_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "media"

The STATIC_URL variable will tell to django (uwsgi) how to define links to static files, and the STATIC_ROOT variable will set the position in which static files (as the admin .css files) will be placed. The MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL variables have the same behavior. You may want to create a /static and /media directory inside smarter, in order to place media files. Then you have to call the collectstatic command in order to place the static files in their directories:

mkdir django-data/smarter/static/
mkdir django-data/smarter/media/
docker-compose run --rm -u $(id -u):www-data uwsgi python manage.py collectstatic

There's also a directory which will be used by django to share files: data inside this folder will be server by nginx after ensuring authentication with django:

# https://github.com/smartfile/django-transfer#downloading
TRANSFER_SERVER = 'nginx'

# force NGINX transfer even in DEBUG mode
ENABLE_TRANSFER = True

# where I can find shared files
SHARED_DIR = BASE_DIR.parent / "data"

TRANSFER_MAPPINGS = {
    # the real position of data dir with the protected nginx folder
    str(SHARED_DIR): '/smarter-repository/protected/',
}

The django shared folder is in django-data/data/, which will be mounted in /var/uwsgi/data into uwsgi container, but will be server using smarter-repository/download location, as described by django smarter/urls.py file.

Initialize database for the first time

You may want to run the following commands to create the necessary django tables if django database is empty. The path of manage.py is not specified, since is defined by the working_dir in docker-compose.yml:

docker-compose run --rm -u $(id -u):www-data uwsgi python manage.py migrate
docker-compose run --rm -u $(id -u):www-data uwsgi python manage.py makemigrations
docker-compose run --rm -u $(id -u):www-data uwsgi python manage.py migrate

More info could be found here

Creating an admin user

You need to create a user who can login to the admin site. Run the following command:

docker-compose run --rm uwsgi python manage.py createsuperuser

A user and password for the admin user will be prompted. Ensure to track such credentials

Create NGINX container

Let's take a look inside nginx directory:

$ tree nginx
nginx/
├── conf.d
│   └── default.conf
├── Dockerfile
└── nginx.conf

The nginx.conf contains general configuration for NGINX. If you need to run different processes or listen for a different number of connection, you may modify this file. The default.conf located in conf.d is the file which need to be modified accordingly to your project location. You can modify this file without building nginx image, since this directory is imported as a volume in nginx container. In this configuration, the served application is supposed to be under smarter-repository location. Django static files are served via nginx by sharing volumes between django uwsgi container. This container expose the standard 80 port outside, but docker-compose.yml could bind this port to a different one

Starting containers with docker compose

Now start database and django (in daemonized mode):

docker-compose up -d

You can inspect docker logs with

docker-compose logs

Uploading SMARTER data

SMARTER data are managed using DVC (https://dvc.org/). You need to install DVC in order to get SMARTER data (since they aren't tracked in git repository). You may want to install DVC git hooks in order to better manage this repository and data:

dvc install

In order to connect to the DVC storage endpoint, you need to override the default user for SSH url:

dvc remote modify --local remote user <your SSH user>

After that, synchronize the data folder using:

dvc pull

The Dataset table is updated using the Data_Description_for_Database.xlsx file. Add the new record properly and ensure that in the filename field there's the local path of the datafile respect to the Data_Description_for_Database.xlsx file position. Please, remember to remove the spaces from the file path. After that, upload the new data using:

docker-compose run --rm -u $(id -u):www-data uwsgi python manage.py \
  import_datasets --input /var/uwsgi/data/Data_Description_for_Database.xlsx

Serving docker containers in docker HOST

You can serve docker compose using HOST NGINX, for instance, via proxy_pass. Place the followin code inside NGINX server environment. Remember to specify the port exported by your docker NGINX instance:

location /smarter-repository/ {
  # set variable in location
  set $my_port 21080;

  # Add info to webpages
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host:$my_port;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $my_port;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;

  # Submitting a request to docker service
  proxy_pass http://<your_host>:$my_port;
  proxy_redirect http://$host:$my_port/ $scheme://$http_host/;
}

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README.md

README.md

SMARTER-repository

Introduction

The docker-compose.yml file

Setting up .env variables

Create the MySQL container

Dumping data from database

Loading data in database

Access database using adminer

Create django container

Manage dependencies

The django-data folder

The Django settings.py file

Initialize database for the first time

Creating an admin user

Create NGINX container

Starting containers with docker compose

Uploading SMARTER data

Serving docker containers in docker HOST

Files

README.md

Latest commit

History

README.md

File metadata and controls

SMARTER-repository

Introduction

The docker-compose.yml file

Setting up .env variables

Create the MySQL container

Dumping data from database

Loading data in database

Access database using adminer

Create django container

Manage dependencies

The django-data folder

The Django settings.py file

Initialize database for the first time

Creating an admin user

Create NGINX container

Starting containers with docker compose

Uploading SMARTER data

Serving docker containers in docker HOST