Django Celery Docker Example

This is a minimal example demonstrating how to set up the components of a Django app behind an Nginx proxy with Celery workers using Docker.

This repo is now archived

Seems like this repo still attracts a lot of views despite being very old! I am not maintaining this repo. It was originally created as an example to illustrate some basic docker concepts to colleagues. Some of the details are probably out of date by now. I no longer use Django. FastAPI or Golang is my go to these days.

Install

git clone git@github.com:chrisk314/django-celery-docker-example.git
cd django-celery-docker-example
virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
export SECRET_KEY=app-secret-key
python3 -m pip install -U pip && python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Run

To run the app, docker and docker-compose must be installed on your system. For installation instructions refer to the Docker docs.

Compose

The app can be run in development mode using Django's built in web server simply by executing

docker-compose up

To remove all containers in the cluster use

docker-compose down

To run the app in production mode, using gunicorn as a web server and nginx as a proxy, the corresponding commands are

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yaml -f docker-compose.prod.yaml up
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yaml -f docker-compose.prod.yaml down

Swarm

It's also possible to use the same compose files to run the services using docker swarm. Docker swarm enables the creation of multi-container clusters running in a multi-host environment with inter-service communication across hosts via overlay networks.

docker swarm init --advertise-addr 127.0.0.1:2377
docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yaml -c docker-compose.prod.yaml proj

It should be noted that the app will not be accessible via localhost in Chrome/Chromium. Instead use 127.0.0.1 in Chrome/Chromium.

To bring down the project or stack and remove the host from the swarm

docker stack rm proj
docker swarm leave --force

Description

The setup here defines distinct development and production environments for the app. Running the app using Django's built in web server with DEBUG=True allows for quick and easy development; however, relying on Django's web server in a production environment is discouraged in the Django docs for security reasons. Additionally, serving large files in production should be handled by a proxy such as nginx to prevent the app from blocking.

 

Compose files

Docker compose files allow the specification of complex configurations of multiple inter-dependent services to be run together as a cluster of docker containers. Consult the excellent docker-compose reference to learn about the many different configurable settings. Compose files are written in .yaml format and feature three top level keys: services, volumes, and networks. Each service in the services section defines a separate docker container with a configuration which is independent of other services.

base compose

To support different environments, several docker-compose files are used in this project. The base compose file, docker-compose.yaml, defines all service configuration common to both the development and production environments. Here's the content of the docker-compose.yaml file

# docker-compose.yaml

version: '3.4'

services:

  rabbitmq:
    container_name: rabbitmq
    hostname: rabbitmq
    image: rabbitmq:latest
    networks:
      - main
    ports:
      - "5672:5672"
    restart: on-failure

  postgres:
    container_name: postgres
    hostname: postgres
    image: postgres:latest
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
      - POSTGRES_DB=postgres
    networks:
      - main
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    restart: on-failure
    volumes:
      - postgresql-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

  app:
    build: .
    command: sh -c "wait-for postgres:5432 && python manage.py collectstatic --no-input && python manage.py migrate && gunicorn mysite.wsgi -b 0.0.0.0:8000"
    container_name: app
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - rabbitmq
    expose:
      - "8000"
    hostname: app
    image: app-image
    networks:
      - main
    restart: on-failure

  celery_worker:
    command: sh -c "wait-for rabbitmq:5672 && wait-for app:8000 -- celery -A mysite worker -l info"
    container_name: celery_worker
    depends_on:
      - app
      - postgres
      - rabbitmq
    deploy:
      replicas: 2
      restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure
      resources:
        limits:
          cpus: '0.50'
          memory: 50M
        reservations:
          cpus: '0.25'
          memory: 20M
    hostname: celery_worker
    image: app-image
    networks:
      - main
    restart: on-failure

  celery_beat:
    command: sh -c "wait-for rabbitmq:5672 && wait-for app:8000 -- celery -A mysite beat -l info --scheduler django_celery_beat.schedulers:DatabaseScheduler"
    container_name: celery_beat
    depends_on:
      - app
      - postgres
      - rabbitmq
    hostname: celery_beat
    image: app-image
    networks:
      - main
    restart: on-failure

networks:
  main:

volumes:
  postgresql-data:

services

This compose file defines five distinct services which each have a single responsibility (this is the core philosophy of Docker): app, postgres, rabbitmq, celery_beat, and celery_worker. The app service is the central component of the Django application responsible for processing user requests and doing whatever it is that the Django app does. The Docker image app-image used by the app service is built from the Dockerfile in this project. For details of how to write a Dockerfile to build a container image, see the docs. The postgres service provides the database used by the Django app and rabbitmq acts as a message broker, distributing tasks in the form of messages from the app to the celery workers for execution. The celery_beat and celery_worker services handle scheduling of periodic tasks and asynchronous execution of tasks defined by the Django app respectively and are discussed in detail here.

networks

Because all the services belong to the same main network defined in the networks section, they are able to find each other on the network by the relevant hostname and communicate with each other on any ports exposed in the service's ports or expose sections. The difference between ports and expose is simple: expose exposes ports only to linked services on the same network; ports exposes ports both to linked services on the same network and to the host machine (either on a random host port or on a specific host port if specified).

services:
  app:
    expose:
      - "8000"
    networks:
      - main

networks:
  main:

Note: When using the expose or ports keys, always specify the ports using strings enclosed in quotes, as ports specified as numbers can be interpreted incorrectly when the compose file is parsed and give unexpected (and confusing) results!

volumes

To persist the database tables used by the app service between successive invocations of the postgres service, a persistent volume is mounted into the postgres service using the volumes keyword. The volume postgresql-data is defined in the volumes section with the default options. This means that Docker will automatically create and manage this persistent volume within the Docker area of the host filesystem.

services:
  postgres:
    volumes:
      - postgresql-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

volumes:
  postgresql-data:

Warning: be careful when bringing down containers with persistent volumes not to use the -v argument as this will delete persistent volumes! In other words, only execute docker-compose down -v if you want Docker to delete all named and anonymous volumes.

override compose

When executing docker-compose up, a docker-compose.override.yaml file, if present, automatically overrides settings in the base compose file. It is common to use this feature to specify development environment specific configuration. Here's the content of the docker-compose.override.yaml file

# docker-compose.override.yaml

version: '3.4'

services:

  app:
    command: sh -c "wait-for postgres:5432 && python manage.py migrate && python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000"
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - .:/usr/src/app

The command for the app container has been overridden to use Django's runserver command to run the web server; also, it's not necessary to run collectstatic in the dev environment so this is dropped from the command. Port 8000 in the container has been mapped to port 8000 on the host so that the app is accessible at localhost:8000 on the host machine. To ensure code changes trigger a server restart, the app source directory has been mounted into the container in the volumes section. Bear in mind that host filesystem locations mounted into Docker containers running with the root user are at risk of being modified/damaged so care should be taken in these instances.

production compose

Here's the content of the docker-compose.prod.yaml file which specifies additional service configuration specific to the production environment

# docker-compose.prod.yaml

version: '3.4'

services:

  app:
    environment:
      - DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings.production
      - SECRET_KEY
    volumes:
      - static:/static

  nginx:
    container_name: nginx
    command: wait-for app:8000 -- nginx -g "daemon off;"
    depends_on:
      - app
    image: nginx:alpine
    networks:
      - main
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    restart: on-failure
    volumes:
      - ${PWD}/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
      - ${PWD}/wait-for:/bin/wait-for
      - static:/var/www/app/static

volumes:
  static:

An additional nginx service is specified to act as a proxy for the app, which is discussed in detail here. Changes to the app service include: a production specific Django settings module, a secret key sourced from the environment, and a persistent volume for static files which is shared with the nginx service. Importantly, the nginx service must use the wait-for script (discussed below) to ensure that the app is ready to accept requests on port 8000 before starting the nginx daemon. Failure to do so will mean that the app is not accessible by nginx without restarting the nginx service once the app service is ready.

 

Service dependency and startup order

The compose file allows dependency relationships to be specified between containers using the depends_on key. In the case of this project, the app service depends on the postgres service (to provide the database) as well as the rabbitmq service (to provide the message broker). In practice this means that when running docker-compose up app, or just docker-compose up, the postgres and rabbitmq services will be started if they are not already running before the app service is started.

services:
  app:
    depends_on:
      - postgres
      - rabbitmq

Unfortunately, specifying depends_on is not sufficient on its own to ensure the correct/desired start up behaviour for the service cluster. This is because Docker starts the app service once both the postgres and rabbitmq services have started; however, just because a service has started does not guarantee that it is ready. It is not possible for Docker to determine when services are ready as this is highly specific to the requirements of a particular service/project. If the app service starts before the postgres service is ready to accept connections on port 5432 then the app will crash.

One possible solution to ensure that a service is ready is to first check if it's accepting connections on it's exposed ports, and only start any dependent services if it is. This is precisely what the wait-for script from eficode is designed to do. The celery_beat and celery_worker services require that both the app and rabbitmq services are ready before starting. To ensure their availability before starting, the celery_worker service command first invokes wait-for to check that both rabbitmq:5672 and app:8000 are reachable before invoking the celery command

services:
  celery_worker:
    command: sh -c "wait-for rabbitmq:5672 && wait-for app:8000 && celery -A mysite worker -l info"

 

Multiple Django settings files

By default, creating a Django project using django-admin startproject mysite results in a single settings file as below:

$ django-admin startproject mysite
$ tree mysite
mysite/
├── manage.py
└── mysite
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── settings.py
    ├── urls.py
    └── wsgi.py

In order to separate development and production specific settings, this single settings.py file can be replaced by a settings folder (which must contain an __init__.py file, thus making it a submodule).

$ tree mysite
mysite/
├── manage.py
└── mysite
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── settings
    │   ├── development.py
    │   ├── __init__.py
    │   ├── production.py
    │   └── settings.py
    ├── urls.py
    └── wsgi.py

All settings common to all environments are now specified in settings/settings.py. This file should still contain default values for all required settings. All that's needed for everything to function correctly as before is a single line in the __init__.py

# settings/__init__.py

from settings import *

Additional or overridden settings specific to the production environment, for example, are now specified in the settings/production.py file like so

# settings/production.py

import os

from settings import *

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['app']
DEBUG = False
PRODUCTION = True
SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get('SECRET_KEY')

To tell Django to use a specific settings file, the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable must be set accordingly, i.e.,

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings.production
python manage.py runserver 0:8000

 

Celery config

To ensure that the Django app does not block due to serial execution of long running tasks, celery workers are used. Celery provides a pool of worker processes to which cpu heavy or long running io tasks can be deferred in the form of asynchronous tasks. Many good guides exist which explain how to set up Celery such as this one. Whilst it can seem overwhelming at first it's actually quite straightforward once it's been set up once.

Firstly, the Celery app needs to be defined in mysite/celery_app.py, set to obtain configuration from the Django config, and to automatically discover tasks defined throughout the Django project

# mysite/celery_app.py

import os

from celery import Celery

# Set default Django settings
os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.settings')

app = Celery('mysite')
app.config_from_object('django.conf:settings', namespace='CELERY')
app.autodiscover_tasks()

Celery related configuration is pulled in from the Django settings file, specifically any variables beginning with 'CELERY' will be interpreted as Celery related settings.

# mysite/setttings/settings.py

from celery.schedules import crontab

CELERY_BROKER_URL= 'pyamqp://rabbitmq:5672'
CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = 'django-db'
CELERY_BEAT_SCHEDULE = {
    'queue_every_five_mins': {
        'task': 'polls.tasks.query_every_five_mins',
        'schedule': crontab(minute=5),
    },
}

The message broker is specified using the rabbitmq service hostname which can be resolved by any service on the main network. The Django app's database, i.e., the postgres service, will be used as the Celery result backend. Periodic tasks to be scheduled by the celery_beat service are also defined here. In this case, there is a single periodic task, polls.tasks.query_every_five_mins, which will be executed every 5 minutes as specified by the crontab.

The Celery app must be added in to the Django module's __all__ variable in mysite/__init__.py like so

# mysite/__init__.py

from .celery_app import app as celery_app

__all__ = ('celery_app',)

Finally, tasks to be executed by the workers can be defined within each app of the Django project, usually in files named tasks.py by convention. The polls/tasks.py file contains the following (very contrived!) tasks

# polls/tasks.py

import time

from .models import Question
from mysite.celery_app import app as celery_app


@celery_app.task
def do_some_queries():
    time.sleep(10)
    return Question.objects.count()


@celery_app.task
def query_every_five_mins():
    pass

Note the use of the @task decorator, which is required to make the associated callable discoverable and executable by the celery workers.

Delegating a task to Celery and checking/fetching its results is straightforward as demonstrated in these view functions from polls/views.py

# polls/views.py

from celery.result import AsyncResult
from django.http import JsonResponse
from django.shortcuts import render

from .tasks import do_some_queries


def index(request):
    res = do_some_queries.delay()
    questions_count = res.get() if res.ready() else None
    context = (
        {"questions_count": questions_count}
        if questions_count is not None
        else {"task_id": res.task_id}
    )
    return render(request, "polls/index.html", context)


def check(request, task_id):
    task = AsyncResult(task_id)
    return JsonResponse({"questions_count": task.get() if task.ready() else None})

Finally, the Celery services need to be defined in the docker-compose.yaml file, as can be seen here. Note, the Celery services need to be on the same network as the app, postgres, and rabbitmq services and are defined as being dependent on these services. The Celery services need access to the same code as the Django app, so these services reuse the app-image Docker image which is built by the app service.

Multiple instances of the worker process can be created using the docker-compose scale command. It's also possible to set the number of workers when invoking the up command like so

docker-compose up --scale celery_worker=4

 

Nginx

In production, Nginx should be used as the web server for the app, passing requests to gunicorn which in turn interacts with the app via the app's Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI). This great guide explains setting up Nginx+gunicorn+Django in a Docker environment.

In production, the following command is executed by the app service to run the gunicorn web server to serve requests for the Django application after first waiting for the postgres service to be ready, collecting static files into the static volume shared with the nginx service, and performing any necessary database migrations

wait-for postgres:5432\
  && python manage.py collectstatic --no-input\
  && python manage.py migrate\
  && gunicorn mysite.wsgi -b 0.0.0.0:8000

To successfully run the app service's production command, gunicorn must be added to the project's requirements in requirements/production.in. It is the packages installed using this requirements file which are frozen (python -m pip freeze > requirements.txt) in to the top level requirements.txt file used by the Dockerfile to install the Python dependencies for the app-image Docker image.

# requirements/prod.in

-r base.in
gunicorn

The app service exposes port 8000 on which the gunicorn web server is listening. The nginx service needs to be configured to act as a proxy server, listening for requests on port 80 and forwarding these on to the app on port 8000. Configuration for the nginx service is specified in the nginx.conf file shown below which is bind mounted into the nginx service at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.

# nginx.conf

user  nginx;
worker_processes  1;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;  ## Default: 1024, increase if you have lots of clients
}

http {
  include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;
  sendfile        on;
  keepalive_timeout  5s;

  log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" $status '
    '$body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
  access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

  upstream app {
    server app:8000;
  }

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;
    charset utf-8;

    location /static/ {
      autoindex on;
      alias /var/www/app/static/;
    }

    location / {
      proxy_redirect     off;
      proxy_set_header   Host app;
      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 $server_name;
      proxy_pass http://app;
    }

    location /protected/ {
      internal;
      alias /var/www/app/static/download/;
    }

  }
}

The proxy is configured to serve any requests for static assets on routes beginning with /static/ directly. This reduces the burden of serving images and other static assets from the Django app, which are more efficiently handled by Nginx. Any requests on routes beginning with /protected/ will also be handled directly by Nginx, but this internal redirection will be invisible to the client. This allows the Django app to defer serving large files to Nginx, which is more efficient for this task, thus preventing the app from blocking other requests whilst large files are being served.

A request for the route /polls/download/ will be routed by Nginx to gunicorn and reach the Django app's download view shown below. The Django view could then be used, for example, to check if a user is logged in and has permission to download the requested file. The file can then be created/selected inside the view function before the actual serving of the file is handed over to Nginx using the X-Accel-Redirect header. The app returns a regular HTTP response instead of a file response. Nginx detects the X-Accel-Redirect header and takes over serving the file. In this contrived example, the app service creates a file in /static/download/ inside the shared static volume, which corresponds to /var/www/app/static/download/ in the nginx service's filesystem. The file path in the X-Accel-Redirect is set to /protected/ which is picked up by Nginx and converted to /var/www/app/static/download/ due to the alias defined in the configuration. Importantly, because the app runs as root with a uid of 0, and the nginx service uses the nginx user with a different uid, the permissions on the file must be set to "readable by others" so that the nginx worker can successfully read and, hence, serve the file to the client. This mechanism can easily and efficiently facilitate downloads of large, protected files/assets.

# polls/views.py

import os
import stat
from tempfile import NamedTemporaryFile

from django.conf import settings
from django.http import FileResponse, HttpResponse


def download(request):
    dl_dir = os.path.join(settings.STATIC_ROOT, 'download')
    if not os.path.exists(dl_dir):
        os.makedirs(dl_dir)

    tmpfile = NamedTemporaryFile(dir=dl_dir, suffix='.txt', delete=False).name
    fname = os.path.basename(tmpfile)
    with open(tmpfile, 'w') as f:
        f.write('hello\n')

    if settings.PRODUCTION:
        response = HttpResponse(content_type='application/force-download')
        response['X-Accel-Redirect'] = f'/protected/{fname}'
        os.chmod(tmpfile, stat.S_IROTH)  # Ensure file is readable by nginx
    else:
        response = FileResponse(
            open(tmpfile, 'rb'), content_type='application/force-download'
        )

    response['Content-Disposition'] = f'attachment; filename={fname}'
    response['Content-Length'] = os.path.getsize(tmpfile)

    return response

 

Python environments

A common complaint about Python is difficulty managing environments and issues caused be the presence of different versions of Python on a single system. To a greater or lesser extent these issues are eliminated by the use of virtual environments using virtualenv. It's considered best practice to only include dependencies in your project's environment which are required; however, it's also often convenient to have additional packages available which help to make the development process more smooth/efficient. To this end it is possible to create multiple virtual environments which leverage inheritance and to split the dependencies into multiple requirements files which can also make use of inheritance.

This project makes use of separate requirements files for each different environment:

$ tree requirements
requirements
├── base.in
├── dev.in
├── prod.in
└── test.in

Common requirements for all environments are specified in the requirements/base.in file:

$ cat requirements/base.in
Django
celery
django-celery-beat
django-celery-results
psycopg2

The requirements/dev.in and requirements/prod.in files inherit the common dependencies from requirements/base.in and specify additional dependencies specific to the development and production environments respectively.

$ cat requirements/dev.in
-r base.in
ipython

$ cat requirements/prod.in
-r base.in
gunicorn

Distinct virtual environments can be created for each requirements file which inherit from a base virtual env using .pth files like so

$ virtualenv -p python3.6 venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ python -m pip install -r requirements/base.in
(venv) $ deactivate
$ virtualenv -p venv/bin/python venv-dev
$ realpath venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages > venv-dev/lib/python3.6/site-packages/base_venv.pth
$ source venv-dev/bin/activate
(venv-dev) $ python -m pip install -r requirements/dev.in

When installing the development dependencies, only those dependencies not already present in the base environment will be installed.