Advanced Container Configuration Options

Deploying GovReady-Q’s advanced configuration options supports a variety of architectures for enterprise deployments.

The docker_container_run.sh script

For more complex setups, using our run script instead will be easier:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GovReady/govready-q/master/deployment/docker/docker_container_run.sh
chmod +x docker_container_run.sh
./docker_container_run.sh

Advanced container options can be set with command-line arguments to our container run script:

./docker_container_run.sh ...GovReady-Q arguments... -- ...Docker arguments...

Changing the hostname and port

The public address (as users see it)

The container will run at localhost:8000 by default, it will only be accessible from the host machine, and because of HTTP Host header checking you must visit GovReady-Q using the same hostname it is configured to run at (so, with default settings, visiting 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost will result in an error).

You may change the hostname and port of the GovReady-Q server using:

./docker_container_run.sh --address q.mydomain.com:80

If the Docker container is behind a proxy, then --address specifies the public address that end-users will use to access GovReady-Q. This may differ from the address and port that the container is accessed at on your organization’s network, which is set using --bind.

Add --https if end users will access GovReady-Q with https: URLs. This must be done through a proxy that accepts HTTPS connections and passes the requests using HTTP to the Docker container. See the HTTPS environment variable, below.

The address that the container is bound to

Use --bind IP:PORT to control how the listening socket is created on the host machine. The default value of --bind is 127.0.0.1 and the port from --address, or 127.0.0.1:8000 if --address isn’t given. If the host machine is behind a proxy, use --bind to control the network interface and port that Docker will forward to the GovReady-Q container.

./docker_container_run.sh --bind 10.0.0.5:6543

Persistent database

In a production environment it is important to have GovReady-Q connect to a persistent database instead of the database stored inside the container, which will be destroyed when the container is destroyed. There are two methods for connecting to a persistent database.

You can use a Sqlite file stored on the host machine:

./docker_container_run.sh --sqlitedb /path/to/govready-q-database.sqlite

You must specify an absolute path. The path is mounted using a Docker bind mount into the container filesystem.

The file must be readable and writable by the container process, which is running as user 1000/group 1000. Although the container is running as a user isolated from the host environment, filesystem permissions for mounted files are based on comparing the raw user/group IDs of the file’s owner/group on the host to the raw user/group ID of the process running in the container. Consider granting user 1000 read/write permission to the database using ACLs:

setfacl -m u:1000:rw /path/to/govready-q-database.sqlite

Of course, do not do this if the host machine has a user 1000 that you do not trust.

You can also connect to a database running on a remote system accessible to the Docker container.

For instance, you might run a second Docker container holding a Postgres server.

DBPASSWORD=mysecretpassword
docker container run --name govready-q-db -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$DBPASSWORD -d postgres
DBHOST=$(docker container inspect govready-q-db | jq -r .[0].NetworkSettings.IPAddress)
DBUSER=postgres
DBDATABASE=postgres

(This example uses jq, a JSON parsing tool, to extract the IP address of the database container. You can install jq or just set DBHOST manually by looking for the IP address in docker container inspect govready-q-db.)

Start the GovReady-Q container with the argument:

./docker_container_run.sh --dburl postgres://$DBUSER:$DBPASSWORD@$DBHOST/$DBDATABASE

where $DBHOST is the hostname of the database server, $DBDATABASE is the name of the database, and $DBUSER and $DBPASSWORD are the credentials for the database.

You can also use a MySQL or MariaDB server using the syntax mysql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/NAME.

Configuring email

GovReady-Q sends outbound emails for notifications about invitations and discussions. It also receives inbound emails — replies to discussion notifications can be used to post discussion comments by email.

The default Govready-Q instance cannot send email or receive comment replies until it is configured to use a transactional mail provider like Mailgun.

To configure outbound email, use:

./docker_container_run.sh --email-host smtp.company.org --email-port 587 --email-user ... --email-pw ... --email-domain q.company.org

--email-domain sets the hostname used in the email address of outbound email. The other arguments set the SMTP relay server details.

Some of GovReady-Q’s outbound emails can be replied to. When a user replies to a notification of a discussion comment, the reply’s body is post as a new comment on the discussion. Currently we only support an incoming notification hook from Mailgun, and it is not yet configurable for the docker deployment. TODO

Container management and other options

Other options that can be passed on the command-line are:

Use --name NAME to specify an alternate name for the container. The default is govready-q.

Use --relaunch to remove an existing container of the same name before launching the new one, if an existing container of the same name exists. This simply runs docker container rm -f NAME.

Add --debug to start GovReady-Q in DEBUG mode, which enables nicer error messages. Do not use in production.

You can additionally pass parameters to the docker container run command by separating the Docker parameters from the GovReady-Q parameters with --, such as:

./docker_container_run.sh --address q.mydomain.com:80 -- -e VAR=VALUE

Adding and developing compliance apps

If you are using the Docker image to develop your own compliance apps, then you will need to bind-mount a directory on your (host) system as a directory within the container so that the container can see your app YAML files. To do so, start the container with the additional command-line argument:

--appsdevdir /path/to/apps

The directory may be empty but it must exist, and you must specify it as an absolute path (due to a Docker limitation).

The directory and its contents must also be readable — and writable, if you intend to use GovReady-Q’s authoring tools — by the container process. The container process is running as user 1000/group 1000. Although the container is running as a user isolated from the host environment, filesystem permissions for mounted files are based on comparing the raw user/group IDs of the file’s owner/group on the host to the raw user/group ID of the process running in the container. Consider granting user 1000 read/write permission to the files, plus execute (i.e. browse) permission to the directories, in the mounted path using ACLs:

setfacl -R -m u:1000:rwX /path/to/apps

Of course, do not do this if the host machine has a user 1000 that you do not trust.

If the directory is not empty, it should have subdirectories for each of your apps. For instance, you would have a YAML file at /path/to/apps/my_app/app.yaml.

To create your first app, you can run

docker container exec -it govready-q python3.6 manage.py compliance_app host your_new_app_name

Replace your_new_app_name with an app identifier, which may contain letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores. host is always just host — don’t change that.

If your new app does not appear in the compliance apps catalog, you may need to force the app catalog cache to be cleared by restarting the container:

docker container restart govready-q

Logs for Debugging

The container’s console shows the output of container’s start-up commands including database migrations and process startup. The container’s console log can be accessed with

docker container logs govready-q

GovReady-Q application logs can be found in /var/log within the container to track status and assist with debugging. These files contain access logs and other program output.

  • /var/log/application-stderr.log - GovReady-Q application standard error

  • /var/log/application-stdout.log - GovReady-Q application standard out

  • /var/log/notificationemails-stderr.log - GovReady-Q email notifications standard error

  • /var/log/notificationemails-stdout.log - GovReady-Q email notifications standard error

  • /var/log/supervisord.log - Supervisor daemon

Debugging “Internal Server Error” Messages

A special management command can be used to see the application log files to debug unhandled “Internal Server Error” (HTTP code 500) messages displayed in the browser to end users

docker container exec govready-q tail_logs
# Replace "govready-q" with name of your container or use container id

tail_logs takes the same arguments as Unix tail. For instance, add -n 1000 to see the most recent 1,000 log lines, or add -f to continue to output the logs as the log files grow.

# most recent 200 lines of logs
docker container exec govready-q tail_logs -n 200

# real-time display of logs
docker container exec govready-q tail_logs -f

The log files can also be accessed by mounting /var/log with a Docker bind-mount or as a volume (and that’s the only way to see the logs if docker container exec cannot be used in your environment).

Production deployment of the Docker container

The GovReady-Q container runs several processes, including an HTTP/application server and a background process for sending notification emails.

Secure deployments

The container’s processes run exclusively as a non-root user with UID 1000 and GID 1000.

The container may be run with a read-only root filesystem (Docker’s --read-only argument) so long as /run, /tmp, and /var/log are writable. When the --dburl argument is given to our docker_container_run.sh script, a read-only filesystem is activated using:

--read-only --tmpfs /run --tmpfs /tmp --tmpfs /var/log

The three directories can be made writable either by being mounted as tmpfs temporary filesystems, as above, or using a bind mount or a Docker volume. In production environments where the container is launched without our script, it is recommended to use tempfs for /run and /tmp and to mount /var/log to a volume.

Other management commands

See the uWSGI application server JSON process stats:

docker container exec govready-q uwsgi_stats

Updating to a new release of GovReady-Q

Periodically there will be a new release of GovReady-Q as an new image on the Docker Hub. Updating is easy by re-running the same commands again.

  1. There may be an update to docker_container_run.sh. Since this script is not a part of the Docker image, you will need to get it again from this GitHub repository.

  2. You should be using a persistent database as described above. When using a persistent database, it is safe to destroy the govready-q Docker container and start a new one to deploy an update.

  3. Use the same arguments to docker_container_run.sh as when you started the container the last time, but add --relaunch to kill the previous container — you cannot have two containers with the same name or two containers listening on the same port. (You can change the name and port, as described above, if you would like to keep the old container running.)

  4. When the new container starts, database migrations will be applied, if applicable.

For example:

# Update docker_container_run.sh, replacing the old script (with -O).
wget -O docker_container_run.sh \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GovReady/govready-q/master/deployment/docker/docker_container_run.sh
chmod +x docker_container_run.sh

# Remove old container and launch updated container.
./docker_container_run.sh --relaunch [your same command-line arguments]

Environment variables for launching the container without our run script

The following environment variables are used to configure the container when launching GovReady-Q using docker run or a container service (i.e., not when using our docker_container_run.sh helper script).

HOST - The domain name that GovReady-Q will be accessible at by end users. (Default: localhost)

PORT - The port that GovReady-Q will be accessed at by end users, typically either 80 (no HTTPS) or 443 (HTTPS). (Default: 8080)

HTTPS - Set to true if GovReady-Q will be accessed by end users at an https: address. This must be done through a proxy that accepts HTTPS connections and passes the requests using HTTP to the Docker container. The proxy must set the X-Forwarded-Proto: https header. It is also permissible for the proxy to forward HTTP requests, and those requests will be automatically redirected to the https: URL. (Default: false)

DEBUG - Set to true to run in Django debug mode. (Default: false)

DBURL - Set to a database connection string as described in https://github.com/kennethreitz/dj-database-url. We recommend using PostgreSQL using a TLS server certificate, e.g. postgresql://user:password@dbhost/govready_q?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/path/to/pgsql.crt (although you’ll have to figure out how to get the server certificate accessible via the container filesystem). (Default: Not set, which means using a Sqlite database stored in the container at /usr/src/app/local/database.sqlite, which will be ephemeral if the path is not mounted to the host or a Docker volume.)

EMAIL_HOST, EMAIL_PORT, EMAIL_USER, EMAIL_PW, and EMAIL_DOMAIN - For enabling outbound email. The host, port, username, and password settings specify a TLS-enabled SMTP server. EMAIL_DOMAIN is the domain name to use in outbound mail. (Default: Not set and outbound emails are dumped to logs for debugging.) To test the email configuration from the command-line, you can run docker container exec -it govready-q python3.6 manage.py sendtestemail you@example.com. If email is configured, you should not see any output and you should get a test email.

FIRST_RUN - If set to 1, an administrator user will be created when the container launches and a randomly generated password will be given to the user and printed on the console, which will be visible in the container’s logs. An organization named main will also be created.

PROCESSES - The number of concurrent requests that can be handled by the container. (Default: 4)

SECRET_KEY - The Django SECRET_KEY for session management. (Try this tool to generate one.)

ADMINS - The Django ADMINS setting, passed as raw JSON. Example: [["Admin Name 1", "admin1@example.com"], ["Admin Name 2", "admin2@example.com"]]. (Default: Empty list, i.e. [].)

SYSLOG - The host and port of a syslog-compatible log message sink. (Default: None.)

MAILGUN_API_KEY - An API key for Mailgun which is used to validate incoming webhook requests from Mailgun when an incoming email is received, when Mailgun is configured to handle incoming mail. (Default: None)

BRANDING (downstream packaging only): You may override the templates and stylesheets that are used for GovReady-Q’s branding by setting this environment variable to the name of an installed Django app Python module (i.e. created using manage.py startapp) that holds templates and static files. No such app is provided in the GovReady-Q published Docker image, so this variable can only be used by downstream image maintainers. See Applying Custom Organization Branding.

PROXY_AUTHENTICATION_USER_HEADER and PROXY_AUTHENTICATION_EMAIL_HEADER: GovReady-Q can be deployed behind a reverse proxy that authenticates users and passes the authenticated user’s username and email address in HTTP headers. These environment variables correspond to the settings documented in Enterprise Login.

Running tests

GovReady-Q’s unit tests can be run within the Docker container. After building the image:

docker container run --rm -it govready/govready-q:latest python3.6 manage.py test

Or once a Docker container running GovReady-Q is started (and named govready-q), use exec to begin a shell within the container, and then launch the unit tests:

docker container exec -it govready-q bash
python3.6 manage.py test guidedmodules

The functional tests run a headless Chromium web browser session. We welcome assistance figuring out how to get this to work in our Docker container. Chromium’s process isolation capabilities seem to require special system privileges (i.e. docker run --privileged --cap-add SYS_ADMIN) or Chromium command-line flags (--no-sandbox --disable-gpu).

yum install -y chromium chromedriver
python3.6 manage.py test
...
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: unknown error: Chrome failed to start: exited abnormally

Populating sample data for manual testing and verification

If you wish to add sample data for testing purposes to your GovReady-Q image, run the following command (after first_run has completed):

docker container exec -it govready-q add_data --non-interactive

This will run a quickstart command to generate data in your GovReady-Q instance, as described in more detail in the Testing section of this documentation.