Running Nitrate as a Docker container

Build Docker image

You can build a Docker image of Nitrate by running:

make release-image

This will create a Docker image based on base image registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:28 from released version. By default the image tag will be nitrate/nitrate:<release version>.

Run Nitrate inside Container

You have two choices to run Nitrate inside container. One way is to use podman-compose or docker-compose:

podman-compose -f container-compose.yml up

Then, visit http://127.0.0.1:8001/

This will create two containers:

• A web container based on the specific version of Nitrate image specified in podman-compose.yml.

• A MariaDB database container.

There are two volumes for persistent data storage created. Refer to container-compose.yml for available volumes.

Please note that, this requires you to have a copy (probable cloned from git repository) of Nitrate source code. It is recommended for you to deploy Nitrate into a container environment, e.g. OpenShift. This is the second way you should choose for running Nitrate in production.

Initial configuration of running container

Nitrate development image has an entrypoint which tries to do database migrations and create a superuser for initial use. However, you are free to do it for yourself by executing:

# Do database migrations
docker exec -it --env DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=tcms.settings.product \
    nitrate_web_1 /prodenv/bin/django-admin migrate

# Create a superuser in order to manage site
docker exec -it --env DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=tcms.settings.product \
    nitrate_web_1 /prodenv/bin/django-admin createsuperuser

# Set permissions to default groups
docker exec -it --env DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=tcms.settings.product \
    nitrate_web_1 /prodenv/bin/django-admin setdefaultperms

Upgrading

There should be no difference to update docker image. Each time when you run a newer version of Nitrate, please ensure read the release notes to know what must be done for upgrade.

Generally, running database migrations is a common task for upgrade. This can be done inside the container:

docker exec -it --env DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=tcms.settings.product \
    nitrate_web_1 /prodenv/bin/django-admin migrate

Note

Uploads and database data should stay intact because they are split into separate volumes, which makes upgrading very easy. However you may want to back these up before upgrading!