Maintain the media files after build with Docker Container - Django

Question

I am using Django as a Web Framework. Azure NGINEX as WebServer. My Project is deployed with Docker Containers.

In my Django project root structure will be as follows:

root:
  - app1
  - app2
  - media

whenever saving images, it will correctly save under media folder. But whenever doing "docker-compose up" it will replaces the source code, so that my media folder will be cleaned up everytime.

In my settings.py file, I have added as follows:

 MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR,'media')
 MEDIA_URL = 'media/'

Kindly help me to maintain the media files with Docker based Environment

Answer 1

As mentioned in the previous answer, this isn't a best practice to handle media and static inside your project or app directory rather you can use a file or file storage server. But I am trying to give the answer to your question here.

Suppose you have a Django project directory named root and inside this, you are managing the media and static folders. As you are using Docker every time your container gets restarted, it wipes out the contents from both these folders. So what you have to do here is mount your media and static folders from inside of your container to your local storage i.e /var/lib/docker/volumes/{volume_name}/_data to persist your media and static files in between restarts of your container.

I am describing here the docker-compose version:

version: "3.8"
services:
   app:
     image: {your django project image}
    #build: {direct build of your Dockerfile}
     volumes:
       - media:/src/media/
       - static:/src/static/

volumes:
  media:
  static:
     

My goal here is to point out volume mount, so in the above code, you have to define volumes this way, where /src is the working directory defined in your Dockerfile using the WORKDIR directive. And in my case media and static are the direct children of the src folder. Now you can run docker volume ls to see your volume names and using the name you can inspect your volumes using this command docker volume inspect {volume_name}. Usually, you will find your volumes i.e media and static here -

/var/lib/docker/volumes/{{container_name]_media}/_data
/var/lib/docker/volumes/{{container_name]_static}/_data

Hope this clears the question.

Answer 2

You have to basically do 2 things:

• Changing the directory to keep the media files to somewhere out of your source code directory - it's not any good practice to keep them in the source directory because of several reasons,
• Using docker volumes in your docker-compose configuration file to persist your media directory. You can find the detailed documentation on the way to configure volumes in docker-compose here.