This is a guide on how to deploy a multicontainer Docker web application on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. The web application will be a basic Django hello world, but has a completely functioning Postgres database. This post is geared towards beginners.

Motivation

Learning web development is challenging, and a lot of it is just trying out what works. But it helps to understand the big picture.

The Big Picture

Web Client <=> Elastic Beanstalk Load Balancer <=> Nginx <=> Gunicorn <=> uWSGI <=> Django

Install Docker

Set up the project directory.

mkdir myproject
cd myproject

Create a virtual environment, and activate.

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Create requirements.txt:

Django==2.0.7
gunicorn==19.6.0
psycopg2==2.7.5

django-admin.py startproject myproject app

In app/myproject/settings.py

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
        'NAME': 'postgres',
        'USER': 'postgres',
        'HOST': 'db',
        'PORT': 5432,
    }
}

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['app']

pip install docker-compose

References:

• https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/Django_and_nginx.html