Dockerising Python

Fly have changed their default application support to avoid buildpacks and provide a default Dockerfile when starting new projects. I’ve been meaning to upgrade my projects to Python 3.12 as well and when one of my buildpack projects stopped deploying I ended up spending some time on how to best package Python applications for a PaaS deployment.

I read about which distribution to use as your base image but I haven’t personally encountered those problems and my image sizes are definitely smaller with Alpine.

Docker’s official documentation is a nightmare with no two Dockerfiles being consistent in approach. This page has some commented example files under the manual tabs but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to generate a direct link to it which seems, actually typical of my documentation experience.

There also doesn’t seem to be a consistent view as to whether an application should use the system Python or a virtual environment within the container. The latter seems more logical to me and is what I was doing previously but the default Fly configuration isn’t set up that way.

Services

I have quite a few single user hobby web projects and I’ve been wondering if they wouldn’t work a lot better with a local SQLite datastore but it is actually often easier to use a cloud Postgres service than it is have a secure read-write directory available to an app and manage backups and so on yourself.

Turso is taking this idea one step further to try and solve the multi-tenancy issue by providing every client with a lightweight database.

I gave Proton Docs a whirl this month and they are pretty usable with the caveat that I haven’t tried sharing and collaboratively editing them yet. The one thing that is missing for me at the moment is keyboard shortcuts which seem pretty necessary when you’re typing.

I had previously tried de-Googling with Cryptpad which is reasonable for spreadsheet but has a really clunky document interface compared to Google Docs and which I ended up using more out of principle than because it was an equivalent product.

Reading list

It’s possible to get hung up on what good image description looks but this WAI guide to writing alt text for images is straight-forward and breaks down the most common cases with examples.

Smolweb is a manifesto for a smaller, lighter web which aligns for me with the Sustainable Web initiatives. There are a few interesting ideas in the manifesto such as using a Content Security Policy to stop you from including content from other sites (such as CDNs).

Following up on this theme is a W3 standard for an Ethical Web which also felt very inspiring. Or maybe depressing that some of these things need to be formulated in a common set of principles.

I also found out about the hobby Spartan protocol this month which seems like it would be a fun thing to implement and is closer to the original HTTP spec which was reasonable easy for people to follow and implement.