I recently watched a talk called “Containerless Django – Deploying without Docker”, by Peter Baumgartner. Peter lists some benefits of Docker: that it gives you a pipeline for getting code tested and deployed, the container adds some security to the app, state can be isolated in the container, and it lets you run the exact same code in development and production.
Peter also lists some drawbacks to Docker: it’s a lot of code that could slow things down or have bugs, docker artifacts can be relatively large, and it adds extra abstractions to the system (eg. filesystem, network). He argues that an ideal deployment would include downloading a binary, creating a configuration file, and running it (like one can do with compiled C or Go programs).
Peter describes a process of deploying Django apps by creating a zipapp using shiv and goodconf, and deploying it with systemd constraints that add to the security. He argues that this process achieves most of the benefits of Docker, but more simply, and that there’s a sweet spot for application size where this type of deploy is a good solution.
I decided to try using shiv with our image server Loris. I ran the shiv command “shiv -o loris.pyz .”, and I got the following error:
User “loris” and or group “loris” do(es) not exist.
Please create this user, e.g.:
`useradd -d /var/www/loris -s /sbin/false loris`
The issue is that in the Loris setup.py file, the install process not only checks for the loris user as shown in the error, but it also sets up directories on the filesystem (including setting the owner and permission, which requires root permissions). I submitted a PR to remove the filesystem setup from the Python package installation (and put it in a script the user can run), and hopefully in the future it will be easier to package up Loris and deploy it different ways.