Serve Django Media Files via Nginx (Django/React/Nginx/Docker-Compose)

Ask Time：2019-02-28T01:19:03 Author：Teddy

Context

I have a single page web app using the following stack:

React for the frontend
Django for the backend
Nginx for the webserver

The web application is dockerized using docker-compose. My React app, fetches data from the Django server (django is built as an api endpoint using Django Rest Framework).

Question/Problem

I am having an issue on deployment where I am unable to serve my media files via Nginx.

What have I tried so far

My initial thought was to serve the media files as shown on this stackoverflow post - which is pretty straight forward. Though, since Nginx runs in its own docker (and so does my django server), I unable to point to my django media files since they are in different containers.

Ideally, I would not want to use webpack, and have Nginx take care of serving media files.

If you look at the nginx Dockerfile below, you will see that I am copying my static files into /usr/share/nginx/html/static/staticfiles to then serve them using nginx (see location ^~ /static/ in nginx.conf). I have tried to do the same thing for my media file (as a test) and it works - though, all the files I am uploding once the site is up are not accessible since the copy happens when I build my container.

File Structure

Root Dirc  
 |__ docker-compose.yml  
 |__ backend  
      |__ root  
           |__ Project
                |__ api
                     |__ models.py
                     |__ ...
                |__ media
           |__ teddycrepineau
                |__ settings.py
                |__ ...
           |__ production
                |__ Dockerfile
 |__ nginx
      |__ Dockerfile
      |__ nginx.conf
 |__ frontend
      |__ ...

Relevant Code

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'

volumes:
  postgres_data: {}
  postgres_backup: {}

services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres
    volumes: 
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
      - postgres_backup:/backups
    env_file: .env

  nginx:
    container_name: nginx
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ./nginx/Dockerfile
    image: nginx
    restart: always
    depends_on: 
      - django
    ports:
      - "80:80"

  django:
    container_name: django
    build:
      context: backend
      dockerfile: ./root/production/Dockerfile
    hostname: django
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
    volumes:
      - ./backend:/app/
    depends_on: 
      - postgres
    command: >
      bash -c '
      python3 ./root/manage.py makemigrations &&
      python3 ./root/manage.py migrate &&
      python3 ./root/manage.py initadmin &&
      gunicorn teddycrepineau.wsgi -b 0.0.0.0:8000 --chdir=./root/'

    env_file: .env

nginx.conf

user nginx;
worker_processes 1;

error_log   /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid         /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include         /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type    application/octet-stream;

    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log      /var/log/nginx/access.log main;

    upstream app {
        server django:8000;
    }

    server {
        listen  80 default_server;
        listen  [::]:80 default_server;
        server_name 0.0.0.0;
        charset utf-80;

        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index index.html;

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ @proxy_to_app;
        }

        location @proxy_to_app {
            rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.html last;
        }

        location ^~ /static/ {
            autoindex on;
            alias /usr/share/nginx/html/static/;
        }

        location ~ ^/api {
            proxy_pass http://django:8000;
        }
        location ~ ^/admin {
            proxy_pass http://django:8000;
        }
    }
}

nginx Dockerfile

FROM nginx:latest
ADD ./nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
COPY ./frontend/build /usr/share/nginx/html
COPY ./backend/root/staticfiles /usr/share/nginx/html/static/staticfiles

Django Dockerfile

FROM python:3.7

ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1

RUN export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

RUN mkdir /app

RUN pip install --upgrade pip
ADD /root/requirements.txt /app/

WORKDIR /app/
ADD . /app/

RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

EXPOSE 8000

Django settings.py

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))
APPS_DIR = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'project')
....
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(APPS_DIR, 'media/')

Django urls.py

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    re_path(r'^api/', include('project.api.urls')),
    path('summernote/', include('django_summernote.urls')),
] 
urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

Update

When I mount a shared volum and reference it in my nginx.conf I get a 404 page not found when trying to access the image uploaded in the django backend.