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I have a web app built with a framework like FastAPI or Django, and my project uses Poetry to manage the dependencies.

I didn't find any topic similar to this.

The question is: should I install poetry in my production dockerfile and install the dependencies using the poetry, or should I export the requirements.txt and just use pip inside my docker image?

Actually, I am exporting the requirements.txt to the project's root before deploy the app and just using it inside the docker image.

My motivation is that I don't need the "complexity" of using poetry inside a dockerfile, since the requirements.txt is already generated by the poetry and use it inside the image will generate a new step into docker build that can impact the build speed.

However, I have seen much dockerfiles with poetry installation, what makes me think that I am doing a bad use of the tool.

João Paulo Carvalho
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1 Answers1

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There's no need to use poetry in production. To understand this we should look back to what the original reason poetry exists. There are basically two main reasons for poetry:-

  1. To manage python venv for us - in the past people use different range of tools, from home grown script to something like virtualenvwrapper to automatically manage the virtual env.
  2. To help us publishing packages to PyPI

Reason no. 2 not really a concern for this question so let just look at reason no. 1. Why we need something like poetry in dev? It because dev environment could be different between developers. My venv could be in /home/kamal/.venv while John probably want to be fancy and place his virtualenv in /home/john/.local/venv.

When writing notes on how to setup and run your project, how would you write the notes to cater the difference between me and John? We probably use some placeholder such as /path/to/your/venv. Using poetry, we don't have to worry about this. Just write in the notes that you should run the command as:-

poetry run python manage.py runserver ...

Poetry take care of all the differences. But in production, we don't have this problem. Our app in production will be in single place, let say in /app. When writing notes on how to run command on production, we can just write:-

/app/.venv/bin/myapp manage collectstatic ...

Below is a sample Dockerfile we use to deploy our app using docker:-

FROM python:3.10-buster as py-build

# [Optional] Uncomment this section to install additional OS packages.
RUN apt-get update && export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
     && apt-get -y install --no-install-recommends netcat util-linux \
        vim bash-completion yamllint postgresql-client

RUN curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | POETRY_HOME=/opt/poetry python3 -

COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
ENV PATH=/opt/poetry/bin:$PATH
RUN poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true && poetry install

FROM node:14.20.0 as js-build

COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
RUN npm install && npm run production

FROM python:3.10-slim-buster

EXPOSE 8000
COPY --from=py-build /app /app
COPY --from=js-build /app/static /app/static
WORKDIR /app
CMD /app/.venv/bin/run

We use multistage build where in the build stage, we still use poetry to install all the dependecies but in the final stage, we just copy /app which would also include .venv virtualenv folder.

k4ml
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  • Poetry has at least 5 purposes including dependency management (along with bundling, publishing, (v)env, ), which isn't mentioned above (the OP wasn't asking about env). Prod needs certain library versions which are not installed via the Dockerfile above. – jpmorris May 16 '23 at 17:47
  • So you answered that there is no need to use poetry in production and at the same time used it in your example dockerfile. The question was about using poetry to install deps... – smido Jul 04 '23 at 11:01
  • It's a multi-stage docker build. The final docker image doesn't has poetry. – k4ml Jul 05 '23 at 23:42