Django Development with Docker

Working with Docker Containers via SSH

Yes, it's possible to continue your current workflow of connecting from your Windows laptop to your Raspberry Pi via SSH and then accessing Docker containers. VS Code supports this workflow through its Remote Development extensions.

When working with Docker containers on your Raspberry Pi:

1. You can use VS Code's Remote - SSH extension to connect to your Pi
2. Then use the Remote - Containers extension to connect to your Docker containers
3. This allows you to develop directly inside the container while using VS Code on your Windows machine

Docker vs. Virtualenv for Django Development

Switching to Docker for Django development offers several advantages over virtualenv:

Benefits of Docker:

1. Environment consistency: Docker ensures your development environment matches production exactly
2. Isolation: Each Django app runs in its own container with its own dependencies
3. Service orchestration: Docker Compose makes it easy to run multiple services (Django apps, PostgreSQL, etc.)
4. Portability: Docker containers can run on any system with Docker installed

Practical Implementation:

For your specific use case with multiple Django apps and PostgreSQL, you could set up a Docker Compose configuration like:

YAMLCopied
version: '3'

services:
  django_app1:
    build: ./app1
    ports:
      - "8001:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./app1:/code
    depends_on:
      - db

  django_app2:
    build: ./app2
    ports:
      - "8002:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./app2:/code
    depends_on:
      - db

  db:
    image: postgres:13
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data/
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
      - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_DB=postgres

volumes:
  postgres_data:

Each Django app would have its own Dockerfile for building the container image.

For development, you can use the Django development server with different ports:

BASHCopied
django-admin runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

This allows you to run the development server on different ports for each app while accessing them from your Windows machine.

Docker provides better isolation and reproducibility compared to virtualenv, making it particularly valuable when working with multiple applications that might have different dependency requirements.