Django application skeleton deployed to minikube's cluster for local development

This application skeleton serves as the base for a Django application deployed to minikube Kubernetes cluster.

Things to note is that the application architecture includes Django & gunicorn, nginx, and Postgresql.

The local deployment involves 3 pods, each of which contains the following: nginx, PostgreSQL, Django & gunicorn

To get started, clone this repository and run the following commands:

Note: This Readme assumes that you have the docker engine running and docker-compose, minikube, and kubectl installed and configured.

Prerequisites

I am using minikube VM's docker daemon to run local images without having to pull from dockerhub or any other container registries.

These are the steps I followed:

Use minikube docker-env

eval $(minikube docker-env)

Use docker-compose to build your images:

docker-compose build

Run docker images to ensure that the images are present.

Starting minikube-django-architecture

Ensure minikube is running on the machine.

minikube status

After cloning the repo and ensuring minikube is running, next, we mount the local directory to the minikube VM by running the following command:

minikube mount "your/path/to/this/repo's/api/src:/opt/code"

NOTE: This process must stay alive for the mount to be accessible ...

This way, we don't have to keep building our image to test code changes. This allows you to actively work on code on your host machine while having it directly accessible to containers running in the cluster.

Next, we run all the config files using kubectl. This can be done by running the following commands:

# For db service. This will run all the yaml files under db folder.
kubectl apply -f k8s/db/

# For nginx service. This will run all the yaml files under nginx folder.
kubectl apply -f k8s/nginx/

# For api service. This will run all the yaml files under api folder.
kubectl apply -f k8s/api/

Run kubectl get service to ensure that the services are available.

At this point, your Django application should be running. You can get your pods and check their logs by running the following command.

kubectl get pods
kubectl logs <your_pod_name>

Lastly, to access your Django application from the web browser, you need to do port forwarding to Access Applications in a Cluster. You can do this by running the following command:

kubectl port-forward service/nginx 3000:80

Now your application should be accessible from http://localhost:3000

You can also use ingress to access your application from outside world. There is a great tutorial on how to setup ingress on Minikube found here.