Docker Compose setup for CKAN

• Overview
• Quick start
• Development mode
  • Create an extension
• CKAN images
  • Extending the base images
  • Applying patches
• Debugging with pdb
• NGINX
• Known Issues

Overview

This is a set of configuration and setup files to run a CKAN site.

The CKAN images used are from the official CKAN ckan-docker repo

The non-CKAN images are as follows:

• DataPusher: modified from the datapusher image build configuration from the OKFN docker-ckan repo
• PostgreSQL: Official PostgreSQL image. Database files are stored in a named volume.
• Solr: CKAN's pre-configured Solr image. Index data is stored in a named volume.
• Redis: standard Redis image
• NGINX: latest stable nginx image

The site is configured via env vars (the base CKAN image loads ckanext-envvars), that you can set in the .env file.

Quick start

Copy the included .env.example and rename it to .env to modify it depending on your own needs.

Using the default values on the .env.example file will get you a working CKAN instance. There is a sysadmin user created by default with the values defined in CKAN_SYSADMIN_NAME and CKAN_SYSADMIN_PASSWORD(ckan_admin and test1234 by default). This should be obviously changed before running this setup as a public CKAN instance.

To build the images:

docker-compose build

To start the containers:

docker-compose up

Development mode

To develop local extensions use the docker-compose.dev.yml file:

To build the images:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml build

To start the containers:

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

See CKAN Images for more details of what happens when using development mode.

Create an extension

You can use the ckan extension instructions to create a CKAN extension, only executing the command inside the CKAN container and setting the mounted src/ folder as output:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml exec ckan-dev /bin/bash -c "ckan generate extension --output-dir /srv/app/src_extensions"

The new extension files and directories will be created in the src/ folder. You might need to change the owner of its folder to have the appropiate permissions.

CKAN images

The Docker images used to build your CKAN project are located in the ckan/ folder. There are two Docker files:

• Dockerfile: this is based on ckan/ckan-base:<version>, a base image located in the DockerHub repository, that has CKAN installed along with all its dependencies, properly configured and running on uWSGI (production setup)

• Dockerfile.dev: this is based on ckan/ckan-base:<version>-dev also located located in the DockerHub repository, and extends ckan/ckan-base:<version> to include:

  • Any extension cloned on the src folder will be installed in the derived CKAN container when booting up Docker Compose (docker-compose up). This includes installing any requirements listed in a requirements.txt (or pip-requirements.txt) file and running python setup.py develop.
  • CKAN will be started running ckan -c /srv/app/ckan.ini run.
  • Make sure to add the local plugins to the CKAN__PLUGINS env var in the .env file.

From these two base images you can build your own customized image tailored to your project, installing any extensions and extra requirements needed.

Extending the base images

To perform extra initialization steps you can add scripts to your custom images and copy them to the /docker-entrypoint.d folder (The folder should be created for you when you build the image). Any *.sh and *.py file in that folder will be executed just after the main initialization script (prerun.py) is executed and just before the web server and supervisor processes are started.

For instance, consider the following custom image:

ckan
├── docker-entrypoint.d
│   └── setup_validation.sh
├── Dockerfile
└── Dockerfile.dev

We want to install an extension like ckanext-validation that needs to create database tables on startup time. We create a setup_validation.sh script in a docker-entrypoint.d folder with the necessary commands:

#!/bin/bash

# Create DB tables if not there
ckan -c /srv/app/ckan.ini validation init-db 

And then in our Dockerfile.dev file we install the extension and copy the initialization scripts:

FROM ckan/ckan-base:2.9.5-dev

RUN pip install -e git+https://github.com/frictionlessdata/ckanext-validation.git#egg=ckanext-validation && \
    pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frictionlessdata/ckanext-validation/master/requirements.txt

COPY docker-entrypoint.d/* /docker-entrypoint.d/

Applying patches

When building your project specific CKAN images (the ones defined in the ckan/ folder), you can apply patches to CKAN core or any of the built extensions. To do so create a folder inside ckan/patches with the name of the package to patch (ie ckan or ckanext-??). Inside you can place patch files that will be applied when building the images. The patches will be applied in alphabetical order, so you can prefix them sequentially if necessary.

For instance, check the following example image folder:

ckan
├── patches
│   ├── ckan
│   │   ├── 01_datasets_per_page.patch
│   │   ├── 02_groups_per_page.patch
│   │   ├── 03_or_filters.patch
│   └── ckanext-harvest
│       └── 01_resubmit_objects.patch
├── setup
├── Dockerfile
└── Dockerfile.dev

pdb

Add these lines to the ckan-dev service in the docker-compose.dev.yml file

Debug with pdb (example) - Interact with docker attach $(docker container ls -qf name=ckan)

command: python -m pdb /usr/lib/ckan/venv/bin/ckan --config /srv/app/ckan.ini run --host 0.0.0.0 --passthrough-errors

NGINX

• The base Docker Compose configuration uses an NGINX image as the front-end (ie: reverse proxy). It includes HTTPS running on port number 443. A "self-signed" SSL certificate is generated beforehand and the server certificate and key files are included. The NGINX server_name directive and the CN field in the SSL certificate have been both ser to 'localhost'. This should obviously not be used for production.

Known Issues

• Running the tests: Running the tests for CKAN or an extension inside the container will delete your current database. We need to patch CKAN core in our image to work around that.