Peterbe.com

A Python and Preact app deployed on Heroku

13 December 2019 2 comments   Web development, Django, Python, Docker, JavaScript

Heroku is great but it's sometimes painful when your app isn't just in one single language. What I have is a project where the backend is Python (Django) and the frontend is JavaScript (Preact). The folder structure looks like this:

/
  - README.md
  - manage.py
  - requirements.txt
  - my_django_app/
     - settings.py
     - asgi.py
     - api/
        - urls.py
        - views.py
  - frontend/
     - package.json
     - yarn.lock
     - preact.config.js
     - build/
        ...
     - src/
        ...

A bunch of things omitted for brevity but people familiar with Django and preact-cli/create-create-app should be familiar.
The point is that the root is a Python app and the front-end is exclusively inside a sub folder.

When you do local development, you start two servers:

• ./manage.py runserver - starts http://localhost:8000
• cd frontend && yarn start - starts http://localhost:3000

The latter is what you open in your browser. That preact app will do things like:

const response = await fetch('/api/search');

and, in preact.config.js I have this:

export default (config, env, helpers) => {

  if (config.devServer) {
    config.devServer.proxy = [
      {
        path: "/api/**",
        target: "http://localhost:8000"
      }
    ];
  }

};

...which is hopefully self-explanatory. So, calls like GET http://localhost:3000/api/search actually goes to http://localhost:8000/api/search.

That's when doing development. The interesting thing is going into production.

Before we get into Heroku, let's first "merge" the two systems into one and the trick used is Whitenoise. Basically, Django's web server will be responsibly not only for things like /api/search but also static assets such as / --> frontend/build/index.html and /bundle.17ae4.js --> frontend/build/bundle.17ae4.js.

This is basically all you need in settings.py to make that happen:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
    "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware",
    ...
]

WHITENOISE_INDEX_FILE = True

STATIC_URL = "/"
STATIC_ROOT = BASE_DIR / "frontend" / "build"

However, this isn't quite enough because the preact app uses preact-router which uses pushState() and other code-splitting magic so you might have a URL, that users see, like this: https://myapp.example.com/that/thing/special and there's nothing about that in any of the Django urls.py files. Nor is there any file called frontend/build/that/thing/special/index.html or something like that.
So for URLs like that, we have to take a gamble on the Django side and basically hope that the preact-router config knows how to deal with it. So, to make that happen with Whitenoise we need to write a custom middleware that looks like this:

from whitenoise.middleware import WhiteNoiseMiddleware


class CustomWhiteNoiseMiddleware(WhiteNoiseMiddleware):
    def process_request(self, request):
        if self.autorefresh:
            static_file = self.find_file(request.path_info)
        else:
            static_file = self.files.get(request.path_info)

            # These two lines is the magic.
            # Basically, the URL didn't lead to a file (e.g. `/manifest.json`)
            # it's either a API path or it's a custom browser path that only
            # makes sense within preact-router. If that's the case, we just don't
            # know but we'll give the client-side preact-router code the benefit
            # of the doubt and let it through.
            if not static_file and not request.path_info.startswith("/api"):
                static_file = self.files.get("/")

        if static_file is not None:
            return self.serve(static_file, request)

And in settings.py this change:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
-   "whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware",
+   "my_django_app.middleware.CustomWhiteNoiseMiddleware",
    ...
]

Now, all traffic goes through Django. Regular Django view functions, static assets, and everything else fall back to frontend/build/index.html.

Heroku

Heroku tries to make everything so simple for you. You basically, create the app (via the cli or the Heroku web app) and when you're ready you just do git push heroku master. However that won't be enough because there's more to this than Python.

Unfortunately, I didn't take notes of my hair-pulling excruciating journey of trying to add buildpacks and hacks and Procfile s and custom buildpacks. Nothing seemed to work. Perhaps the answer was somewhere in this issue: "Support running an app from a subdirectory" but I just couldn't figure it out. I still find buildpacks confusing when it's beyond Hello World. Also, I didn't want to run Node as a service, I just wanted it as part of the "build process".

Docker to the rescue

Finally I get a chance to try "Deploying with Docker" in Heroku which is a relatively new feature. And the only thing that scared me was that now I need to write a heroku.yml file which was confusing because all I had was a Dockerfile. We'll get back to that in a minute!

So here's how I made a Dockerfile that mixes Python and Node:

FROM node:12 as frontend

COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
RUN cd frontend && yarn install && yarn build


FROM python:3.8-slim

WORKDIR /app

RUN groupadd --gid 10001 app && useradd -g app --uid 10001 --shell /usr/sbin/nologin app
RUN chown app:app /tmp

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get upgrade -y && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    gcc apt-transport-https python-dev

# Gotta try moving this to poetry instead!
COPY ./requirements.txt /app/requirements.txt
RUN pip install --upgrade --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

COPY . /app
COPY --from=frontend /app/frontend/build /app/frontend/build

USER app

ENV PORT=8000
EXPOSE $PORT

CMD uvicorn gitbusy.asgi:application --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

If you're not familiar with it, the critical trick is on the first line where it builds some Node with as frontend. That gives me a thing I can then copy from into the Python image with COPY --from=frontend /app/frontend/build /app/frontend/build.

Now, at the very end, it starts a uvicorn server with all the static .js, index.html, and favicon.ico etc. available to uvicorn which ultimately runs whitenoise.

To run and build:

docker build . -t my_app
docker run -t -i --rm --env-file .env -p 8000:8000 my_app

Now, opening http://localhost:8000/ is a production grade app that mixes Python (runtime) and JavaScript (static).

Heroku + Docker

Heroku says to create a heroku.yml file and that makes sense but what didn't make sense is why I would add cmd line in there when it's already in the Dockerfile. The solution is simple: omit it. Here's what my final heroku.yml file looks like:

build:
  docker:
    web: Dockerfile

Check in the heroku.yml file and git push heroku master and voila, it works!

To see a complete demo of all of this check out https://github.com/peterbe/gitbusy and https://gitbusy.herokuapp.com/

Docker gotcha with building a Dockerfile in sub directory

02 March 2018 1 comment   Docker

tl;dr; Watch out for .dockerignore causing no such file or directory when building Docker images

First I tried to use docker-compose:

▶ docker-compose build ui
Building ui
Step 1/8 : FROM node:9
 ---> 29831ba76d93
Step 2/8 : ADD ui/package.json /package.json
ERROR: Service 'ui' failed to build: ADD failed: stat /var/lib/docker/tmp/docker-builder079614651/ui/package.json: no such file or directory

What the heck? Did I typo the name in the ui/Dockerfile?

The docker-compose.yml directive for this was:

yaml
  ui:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ui/Dockerfile
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=development
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "35729:35729"
    volumes:
      - $PWD/ui:/app
    command: start

I don't know if it's the awesomest way to do docker-compose but I did copy this exactly from a different (working!) project. That other project called the web stuff frontend instead of ui in this project.

The Dockerfile looked like this:

FROM node:9

ADD ./ui/package.json ./
ADD ./ui/package-lock.json ./

RUN npm install

EXPOSE 3000
EXPOSE 35729

CMD [ "npm", "start" ]

Let's try without docker-compose. Or rather, do with docker what docker-compose does for me automatically.

▶ docker build ui -f ui/Dockerfile
Sending build context to Docker daemon  158.2MB
Step 1/8 : FROM node:9
 ---> 29831ba76d93
Step 2/8 : ADD ui/package.json /package.json
ADD failed: stat /var/lib/docker/tmp/docker-builder001494654/ui/package.json: no such file or directory

So I thought I perhaps have misunderstood how relative paths worked. I tried EVERYTHING!

I tried changing to docker build . -f ui/Dockerfile. No luck.

I tried all sorts of combinations of this with also changing the line to ADD ui/package.json ... or ADD /ui/package.json ... or ADD ./package.json ... or ADD package.json .... Nothing worked.

Finally I got it to work by doing

▶ cd ui
▶ docker build . -f Dockerfile

but for that to work I had to remove all references of the directory name ui in the Dockerfile. Nice, but this is not going to work in docker-compose.yml since that starts outside the directory ./ui/.

Sigh!

So then I learned about contexts in docker. Well, I skimmed the docs rapidly. To keep things clean it's a good idea to do things within the directory that matters. So I made this change in the docker-compose.yml:

  ui:
    build:
      context: ui
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=development
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "35729:35729"
    volumes:
      - $PWD/ui:/app
    command: start

(Note the build.context: and build.dockerfile:)

Still doesn't work! 😫 Still various variations of no such file or directory.

The solution

Turns out, in projectroot/.dockerignore it had ui/ as a line entry!!!

I believe this project used to do some of the Python stuff with Docker and the React web app was done "locally" on the host. And since the ui/node_modules directory is so huge someone decided it was smart of avoid Docker mounting that.

Now the .dockerignore has .ui/node_modules and now everything works. I can build it with plain docker and docker-compose from outside the directory.

Perhaps I should have spent the time I spent writing this blog post to instead file a structured GitHub issue on Docker itself somewhere. I.e. that it should have warned be better. Any takers?

When Docker is too slow, use your host

11 January 2018 3 comments   Web development , Django, MacOSX, Docker

I have a side-project that is basically a React frontend, a Django API server and a Node universal React renderer. The killer feature is its Elasticsearch database that searches almost 2.5M large texts and 200K named objects. All the data is stored in a PostgreSQL and there's some Python code that copies that stuff over to Elasticsearch for indexing.

The PostgreSQL database is about 10GB and the Elasticsearch (version 6.1.0) indices are about 6GB. It's moderately big and even though individual searches take, on average ~75ms (in production) it's hefty. At least for a side-project.

On my MacBook Pro, laptop I use Docker to do development. Docker makes it really easy to run one command that starts memcached, Django, a AWS Product API Node app, create-react-app for the search and a separate create-react-app for the stats web app.

At first I tried to also run PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch in Docker too, but after many attempts I had to just give up. It was too slow. Elasticsearch would keep crashing even though I extended my memory in Docker to 4GB.

This very blog (www.peterbe.com) has a similar stack. Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch all running in Docker. It works great. One single docker-compose up web starts everything I need. But when it comes to much larger databases, I found my macOS host to be much more performant.

So the dark side of this is that I have remember to do more things when starting work on this project. My PostgreSQL was installed with Homebrew and is always running on my laptop. For Elasticsearch I have to open a dedicated terminal and go to a specific location to start the Elasticsearch for this project (e.g. make start-elasticsearch).

The way I do this is that I have this in my Django projects settings.py:

import dj_database_url
from decouple import config


DATABASES = {
    'default': config(
        'DATABASE_URL',
        # Hostname 'docker.for.mac.host.internal' assumes
        # you have at least Docker 17.12.
        # For older versions of Docker use 'docker.for.mac.localhost'
        default='postgresql://peterbe@docker.for.mac.host.internal/songsearch',
        cast=dj_database_url.parse
    )
}

ES_HOSTS = config('ES_HOSTS', default='docker.for.mac.host.internal:9200', cast=Csv())

(Actually, in reality the defaults in the settings.py code is localhost and I use docker-compose.yml environment variables to override this, but the point is hopefully still there.)

And that's basically it. Now I get Docker to do what various virtualenvs and terminal scripts used to do but the performance of running the big databases on the host.

Whatsdeployed facelift

05 January 2018 0 comments   Python, Web development, Mozilla, Docker

https://whatsdeployed.io/

tl;dr; Whatsdeployed.io is an impressively simple web app to help web developers and web ops people quickly see what GitHub commits have made it into your Dev, Stage or Prod environment. Today it got a facelift.

The code is now more than 5 years old and has served me well. It's weird to talk too positively about the app because I actually wrote it but because it's so simple in terms of design and effort it feels less personal to talk about it.

Here's what's in the facelift

• Upgraded to Bootstrap 4.
• Instead of relying on downloading a heavy Glyphicon web font, just to display a single checkmark, that's now a simple image.
• Ability to use a GitHub developer personal token to avoid rate limitations on GitHub's API.
• The first lookup to get all commits is now done via the Flask app to use my auth token to avoid the rate limit.
• Much better error handling if any of the underlying requests.get() that the Flask app does, fails. Also includes which URL it failed on.
• Basic validation to prevent submitting the main form without typing anything in.
• You can hack on it with Docker. Thanks @willkg.
• Improved the code that extracts Bugzilla bug numbers out of commit messages. Thanks @edmorely.
• Refreshed screenshots in the README.md
• A brand new introduction text on the home page for people who end up on the site not knowing what it is.
• If any XHR errors happen figuring out the "culprits", you now get a pretty error describing this instead of swallowing it all.

Please let me know if there's anything broken or missing.

How to create-react-app with Docker

17 November 2017 31 comments   Linux, Web development, JavaScript, React, Docker

Why would you want to use Docker to do React app work? Isn't Docker for server-side stuff like Python and Golang etc? No, all the benefits of Docker apply to JavaScript client-side work too.

So there are three main things you want to do with create-react-app; dev server, running tests and creating build artifacts. Let's look at all three but using Docker.

Create-react-app first

If you haven't already, install create-react-app globally:

▶ yarn global add create-react-app

And, once installed, create a new project:

▶ create-react-app docker-create-react-app
...lots of output...

▶ cd docker-create-react-app
▶ ls
README.md    node_modules package.json public       src          yarn.lock

We won't need the node_modules here in the project directory. Instead, when building the image we're going let node_modules stay inside the image. So you can go ahead and... rm -fr node_modules .

Create the Dockerfile

Let's just dive in. This Dockerfile is the minimum:

FROM node:8

ADD yarn.lock /yarn.lock
ADD package.json /package.json

ENV NODE_PATH=/node_modules
ENV PATH=$PATH:/node_modules/.bin
RUN yarn

WORKDIR /app
ADD . /app

EXPOSE 3000
EXPOSE 35729

ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/bash", "/app/run.sh"]
CMD ["start"]

A couple of things to notice here.
First of all we're basing this on the official Node v8 repository on Docker Hub. That gives you a Node and Yarn by default.

Note how the NODE_PATH environment variable puts the node_modules in the root of the container. That's so that it doesn't get added in "here" (i.e. the current working directory). If you didn't do this, the node_modules directory would be part of the mounted volume which not only slows down Docker (since there are so many files) it also isn't necessary to see those files.

Note how the ENTRYPOINT points to run.sh. That's a file we need to create too, alongside the Dockerfile file.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eo pipefail

case $1 in
  start)
    # The '| cat' is to trick Node that this is an non-TTY terminal
    # then react-scripts won't clear the console.
    yarn start | cat
    ;;
  build)
    yarn build
    ;;
  test)
    yarn test $@
    ;;
  *)
    exec "$@"
    ;;
esac

Lastly, as a point of convenience, note that the default CMD is "start". That's so that when you simply run the container the default thing it does is to run yarn start.

Build container

Now let's build it:

▶ docker image build -t react:app .

The -t react:app is up to you. It doesn't matter so much what it is unless you're going to upload your container the a registry. Then you probably want the repository to be something unique.

Let's check that the build is there:

▶ docker image ls react:app
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
react               app                 3ee5c7596f57        13 minutes ago      996MB

996MB! The base Node image is about ~700MB and the node_modules directory (for a clean new create-react-app) is ~160MB (at the time of writing). What the remaining difference is, I'm not sure. But it's empty calories and easy to lose. When you blow away the built image (docker image rmi react:app) your hard drive gets all that back and no actual code is lost.

Before we run it, lets go inside and see what was created:

▶ docker container run -it react:app bash
root@996e708a30c4:/app# ls
Dockerfile  README.md  package.json  public  run.sh  src  yarn.lock
root@996e708a30c4:/app# du -sh /node_modules/
148M    /node_modules/
root@996e708a30c4:/app# sw-precache
Total precache size is about 355 kB for 14 resources.
service-worker.js has been generated with the service worker contents.

The last command (sw-precache) was just to show that executables in /node_modules/.bin are indeed on the $PATH and can be run.

Run container

Now to run it:

▶ docker container run -it -p 3000:3000 react:app
yarn run v1.3.2
$ react-scripts start
Starting the development server...

Compiled successfully!

You can now view docker-create-react-app in the browser.

  Local:            http://localhost:3000/
  On Your Network:  http://172.17.0.2:3000/

Note that the development build is not optimized.
To create a production build, use yarn build.

Pretty good. Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser and you should see the default create-react-app app.

Next step; Warm reloading

create-react-app does not support hot reloading of components. But it does support web page reloading. As soon as a local file is changed, it sends a signal to the browser (using WebSockets) to tell it to... document.location.reload().

To make this work, we need to do two things:
1) Mount the current working directory into the Docker container
2) Expose the WebSocket port

The WebSocket thing is set up by exposing port 35729 to the host (-p 35729:35729).

Below is an example running this with a volume mount and both ports exposed.

▶ docker container run -it -p 3000:3000 -p 35729:35729 -v $(pwd):/app react:app
yarn run v1.3.2
$ react-scripts start
Starting the development server...

Compiled successfully!

You can now view docker-create-react-app in the browser.

  Local:            http://localhost:3000/
  On Your Network:  http://172.17.0.2:3000/

Note that the development build is not optimized.
To create a production build, use yarn build.

Compiling...
Compiled successfully!
Compiling...
Compiled with warnings.

./src/App.js
  Line 7:  'neverused' is assigned a value but never used  no-unused-vars

Search for the keywords to learn more about each warning.
To ignore, add // eslint-disable-next-line to the line before.

Compiling...
Failed to compile.

./src/App.js
Module not found: Can't resolve './Apps.css' in '/app/src'

In the about example output. First I make a harmless save in the src/App.js file just to see that the dev server notices and that my browser reloads when I did that. That's where it says

Compiling...
Compiled successfully!

Secondly, I make an edit that triggers a warning. That's where it says:

Compiling...
Compiled with warnings.

./src/App.js
  Line 7:  'neverused' is assigned a value but never used  no-unused-vars

Search for the keywords to learn more about each warning.
To ignore, add // eslint-disable-next-line to the line before.

And lastly I make an edit by messing with the import line

Compiling...
Failed to compile.

./src/App.js
Module not found: Can't resolve './Apps.css' in '/app/src'

This is great! Isn't create-react-app wonderful?

Build build :)

There are many things you can do with the code you're building. Let's pretend that the intention is to build a single-page-app and then take the static assets (including the index.html) and upload them to a public CDN or something. To do that we need to generate the build directory.

The trick here is to run this with a volume mount so that when it creates /app/build (from the perspective) of the container, that directory effectively becomes visible in the host.

▶ docker container run -it -v $(pwd):/app react:app build
yarn run v1.3.2
$ react-scripts build
Creating an optimized production build...
Compiled successfully.

File sizes after gzip:

  35.59 KB  build/static/js/main.591fd843.js
  299 B     build/static/css/main.c17080f1.css

The project was built assuming it is hosted at the server root.
To override this, specify the homepage in your package.json.
For example, add this to build it for GitHub Pages:

  "homepage" : "http://myname.github.io/myapp",

The build folder is ready to be deployed.
You may serve it with a static server:

  yarn global add serve
  serve -s build

Done in 5.95s.

Now, on the host:

▶ tree build
build
├── asset-manifest.json
├── favicon.ico
├── index.html
├── manifest.json
├── service-worker.js
└── static
    ├── css
    │   ├── main.c17080f1.css
    │   └── main.c17080f1.css.map
    ├── js
    │   ├── main.591fd843.js
    │   └── main.591fd843.js.map
    └── media
        └── logo.5d5d9eef.svg

4 directories, 10 files

The contents of that file you can now upload to a CDN some public Nginx server that points to this as the root directory.

Running tests

This one is so easy and obvious now.

▶ docker container run -it -v $(pwd):/app react:app test

Note the that we're setting up a volume mount here again. Since the test runner is interactive it sits and waits for file changes and re-runs tests immediately, it's important to do the mount now.

All regular jest options work too. For example:

▶ docker container run -it -v $(pwd):/app react:app test --coverage
▶ docker container run -it -v $(pwd):/app react:app test --help

Debugging the node_modules

First of all, when I say "debugging the node_modules", in this context, I'm referring to messing with node_modules whilst running tests or running the dev server.

One way to debug the node_modules used is to enter a bash shell and literally mess with the files inside it. First, start the dev server (or start the test runner) and give the container a name:

▶ docker container run -it -p 3000:3000 -p 35729:35729 -v $(pwd):/app --name mydebugging react:app

Now, in a separate terminal start bash in the container:

▶ docker exec -it mydebugging bash

Once you're in you can install an editor and start editing files:

root@2bf8c877f788:/app# apt-get update && apt-get install jed
root@2bf8c877f788:/app# jed /node_modules/react/index.js

As soon as you make changes to any of the files, the dev server should notice and reload.

When you stop the container all your changes will be reset. So if you had to sprinkle the node_modules with console.log('WHAT THE HECK!') all of those disappear when the container is stopped.

NodeJS shell

This'll come as no surprise by now. You basically run bash and you're there:

▶ docker container run -it -v $(pwd):/app react:app bash
root@2a21e8206a1f:/app# node
> [] + 1
'1'

Conclusion

When I look back at all the commands above, I can definitely see how it's pretty intimidating and daunting. So many things to remember and it's got that nasty feeling where you feel like your controlling your development environment through unwieldy levers rather than your own hands.

But think of the fundamental advantages too! It's all encapsulated now. What you're working on will be based on the exact same version of everything as your teammate, your dev server and your production server are using.

Pros:

• All packaged up and all team members get the exact same versions of everything, including Node and Yarn.
• The node_modules directory gets out of your hair.
• Perhaps some React code is just a small part of a large project. E.g. the frontend is React, the backend is Django. Then with some docker-compose magic you can have it all running with one command without needing to run the frontend in a separate terminal.

Cons:

• Lack of color output in terminal.
• The initial (or infrequent) wait for building the docker image is brutal on a slow network.
• Lots of commands to remember. For example, How do you start a shell again?

In my (Mozilla Services) work, the projects I work on, I actually use docker-compose for all things. And I have a Makefile to help me remember all the various docker-compose commands (thanks Jannis & Will!). One definitely neat thing you can do with docker-compose is start multiple containers. Then you can, with one command, start a Django server and the create-react-app dev server with one command. Perhaps a blog post for another day.

Yet another Docker 'A ha!' moment

05 November 2017 2 comments   MacOSX, Docker

tl;dr; To build once and run Docker containers with different files use a volume mount. If that's not an option, like in CircleCI, avoid volume mount and rely on container build every time.

What the heck is a volume mount anyway?

Laugh all you like but after almost year of using Docker I'm still learning the basics. Apparently. This, now, feels laughable but there's a small chance someone else stumbles like I did and they might appreciate this.

If you have a volume mounted for a service in your docker-compose.yml it will basically take whatever you mount and lay that on top of what was in the Docker container. Doing a volume mount into the same working directory as your container is totally common. When you do that the files on the host (the files/directories mounted) get used between each run. If you don't do that, you're stuck with the files, from your host, from the last time you built.

Consider...:

# Dockerfile
FROM python:3.6-slim
LABEL maintainer="mail@peterbe.com"
COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
CMD ["python", "run.py"]

and...:

#!/usr/bin/env python
if __name__ == '__main__':
    print("hello!")

Let's build it:

$ docker image build -t test:latest .
Sending build context to Docker daemon   5.12kB
Step 1/5 : FROM python:3.6-slim
 ---> 0f1dc0ba8e7b
Step 2/5 : LABEL maintainer "mail@peterbe.com"
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 70cf25f7396c
Step 3/5 : COPY . /app
 ---> 2e95935cbd52
Step 4/5 : WORKDIR /app
 ---> bc5be932c905
Removing intermediate container a66e27ecaab3
Step 5/5 : CMD python run.py
 ---> Running in d0cf9c546fee
 ---> ad930ce66a45
Removing intermediate container d0cf9c546fee
Successfully built ad930ce66a45
Successfully tagged test:latest

And run it:

$ docker container run test:latest
hello!

So basically my little run.py got copied into the container by the Dockerfile. Let's change the file:

$ sed -i.bak s/hello/allo/g run.py
$ python run.py
allo!

But it won't run like that if we run the container again:

$ docker container run test:latest
hello!

So, the container is now built based on a Python file from back of the time the container was built. Two options:

1) Rebuild, or
2) Volume mount in the host directory

This is it! That this is your choice.

Rebuild might take time. So, let's mount the current directory from the host:

$ docker container run -v `pwd`:/app test:latest
allo!

So yay! Now it runs the container with the latest file from my host directory.

The dark side of volume mounts

So, if it's more convenient to "refresh the files in the container" with a volume mount instead of container rebuild, why not always do it for everything?

For one thing, there might be files built inside the container that cease to be visible if you override that workspace with your own volume mount.

The other crucial thing I learned the hard way (seems to obvious now!) is that there isn't always a host directory to mount. In particular, in tecken we use a base ubuntu image and in the run parts of the CircleCI configuration we were using docker-compose run ... with directives (in the docker-compose.yml file) that uses volume mounts. So, the rather cryptic effect was that the files mounted into the container was not the files checked out from the git branch.

The resolution in this case, was to be explicit when running Docker commands in CircleCI to only do build followed by run without a volume mount. In particular, to us it meant changing from docker-compose run frontend lint to docker-compose run frontend-ci lint. Basically, it's a separate directive in the docker-compose.yml file that is exclusive to CI.

In conclusion

I feel dumb for not seeing this clearly before.

The mistake that triggered me was that when I ran docker-compose run test test (first test is the docker compose directive, the second test is the of the script sent to CMD) it didn't change the outputs when I edit the files in my editor. Adding a volume mount to that directive solved it for me locally on my laptop but didn't work in CircleCI for reasons (I can't remember how it errored).

So now we have this:

# In docker-compose.yml

  frontend:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile.frontend
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=development
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "35729:35729"
    volumes:
      - $PWD/frontend:/app
    command: start

  # Same as 'frontend' but no volumes or command
  frontend-ci:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile.frontend