Abu Ashraf Masnun: Django: Running management commands inside a Docker container

Okay, so we have dockerized our django app and we need to run a manage.py command for some task. How do we do that? Simple, we have to locate the container that runs the django app, login and then run the command.

Locate The Container

It’s very likely that our app uses multiple containers to compose the entire system. For exmaple, I have one container running MySQL, one container running Redis and another running the actual Django app. If we want to run manage.py commands, we have to login to the one that runs Django.

While our app is running, we can find the running docker containers using the docker ps command like this:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                    NAMES
308f40bba888        crawler_testscript   "/sbin/my_init"          31 hours ago        Up 3 seconds        5000/tcp                 crawler_testscript_1
3a5ccc872215        crawler_web          "bash run_web.sh"        31 hours ago        Up 4 seconds        0.0.0.0:8000->8000/tcp   crawler_web_1
14f0e260fb2c        redis:latest         "/entrypoint.sh redis"   31 hours ago        Up 4 seconds        0.0.0.0:6379->6379/tcp   crawler_redis_1
252a7092870d        mysql:latest         "/entrypoint.sh mysql"   31 hours ago        Up 4 seconds        0.0.0.0:3306->3306/tcp   crawler_mysql_1

In my case, I am using Docker Compose and I know my Django app runs using the crawler_web image. So we note the name of the container. In the above example, that is – crawler_web_1.

Nice, now we know which container we have to login to.

Logging Into The Container

We use the name of the container to login to it, like this:

docker exec -it crawler_web_1 bash

The command above will connect us to the container and land us on a bash shell. Now we’re ready to run our command.

Running the command

We cd into the directory if necessary and then run the management command.

cd /project
python manage.py <command>

Summary

• docker ps to list running containers and locate the one
• docker exec -it [container_name] bash to login to the bash shell on that container
• cd to the django project and run python manage.py [command]