Conduit Containerized

Introduction
Project Structure
Quickstart
Environment Variables
Usage
Checklist

Introduction

This repository provides a fully containerized setup for the Conduit full‑stack application
(Angular frontend + Django REST backend) using Docker Compose.
It demonstrates a practical containerization setup using Docker Compose, with a focus on understanding how frontend and backend services communicate in a real-world (and partly legacy) project.

Project Structure

conduit-container/
├── docker-compose.yaml
├── .gitmodules             # Submodules: backend + frontend
├── backend/                # Django backend (git submodule)
├── frontend/               # Angular frontend (git submodule)
├── .env.template           # Environment variable template (root)
└── README.md

Quickstart

1. Clone the repository (including submodules)

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/BenjaminTietz/conduit-container.git
cd conduit-container

If you forgot --recurse-submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

The submodule configuration does not rely on the default branches of the included repositories

2. Create your environment file

All backend and frontend configuration values are defined in a single .env file located in the project root.

cp .env.template .env

Modify if needed.

3. Start the full stack

docker compose up --build

docker compose (with a space) is Compose V2, the Docker CLI plugin. The older docker-compose command is Compose V1, which Docker stopped supporting after June 2023. On Debian/Ubuntu the plugin comes from the docker-compose-v2 package, or from docker-compose-plugin in Docker's official repository.

Backend → http://localhost:8000
Frontend → http://localhost:8282

This is a local development stack — both services are bound to localhost and speak plain HTTP, which is fine on a developer machine and only there. The values in the .env block below (DJANGO_DEBUG=True, DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS=*, DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=changeme, the default Postgres password) match that purpose and must not be carried onto a reachable host. Exposing this stack anywhere else means: a generated secret key, DJANGO_DEBUG=False, an explicit host list instead of *, and a reverse proxy in front that terminates TLS.

Environment Variables

The container uses .env to configure Django and PostgreSQL:

# =====================
# Frontend (Angular)
# =====================
BACKEND_API_URL=http://backend:8000/api

# =====================
# Backend (Django)
# =====================
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=changeme
DJANGO_DEBUG=True
DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS=*

CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS=http://localhost:8282,http://127.0.0.1:8282

POSTGRES_NAME=conduit
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
POSTGRES_HOST=db
POSTGRES_PORT=5432

Usage

Backend (Django)

Run inside the backend container:

docker exec -it conduit_backend bash
python manage.py createsuperuser

Frontend (Angular)

The production build is embedded in an NGINX container and served at:

http://localhost:8282

Logging

All services log to stdout/stderr and are managed by Docker's json-file logging driver. Log rotation is enabled to prevent excessive disk usage.

Logs can be accessed via:

docker logs conduit_backend
docker logs conduit_frontend

Logs can optionally be persisted by redirecting Docker logs to a file.

docker logs conduit_backend > conduit_backend-logs.txt
docker logs conduit_frontend > conduit_frontend-logs.txt