Installation with Docker

Table of contents

  1. Set environment files
  2. Run the containers
  3. See containers in execution
  4. Down the containers
  5. Down the containers (removing also volumes)
  6. Reload configuration

Required Docker installation

You need to have Docker and Docker Compose installed on the machine where you want to deploy uvlhub

Only for a development environment

This manual is intended for a development environment. For a production environment, visit Deployment.

Set environment files

First, copy the .env.docker.example file to the .env file that will be used to set the environment variables.

cp .env.docker.example .env

Run the containers

To start containers in development mode, use the docker-compose.dev.yml file located in the docker directory. The command will run in the background (-d).

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.dev.yml up -d

The dev stack brings up six containers:

Container Service What it is
web_app_container web The Flask application, built from docker/images/Dockerfile.dev
mariadb_container db MariaDB, published on port 3306
nginx_web_server_container nginx The reverse proxy in front of the app, published on port 80
selenium_hub_container selenium-hub Selenium Grid hub, on port 4444
selenium_chrome_container selenium-chrome Chrome node for the end-to-end tests
selenium_firefox_container selenium-firefox Firefox node for the end-to-end tests

The project root is bind-mounted into the web container at /workspace, which is also its working directory, so your edits are picked up without rebuilding. On start-up, the entrypoint installs rosemary in editable mode, waits for the database, applies the migrations and, if the database is empty, seeds it with test data before starting the Flask development server.

See containers in execution

To verify that the containers are running correctly, use the following command:

docker ps

If everything worked correctly, you should see the deployed version of uvlhub in development at http://localhost

Down the containers

To bring down (stop) the containers, use the same docker-compose.dev.yml file with the following command:

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.dev.yml down

Down the containers (removing also volumes)

The above command removes the containers but not the volumes. This can be problematic in the case of MariaDB, which continues saving the previous configuration and will give problems if we want to load a different configuration.

To stop the containers and remove the volumes, we will use the -v flag:

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.dev.yml down -v

Reload configuration

If any Dockerfile or docker-compose.*.yml file has been modified, it is necessary to rebuild the images with the --build flag. To do this, execute:

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.dev.yml up -d --build