Feature #2725
open
Proposal: nginx al docker
Description
I am a docker user, and I think it is the best formula to facilitate installations for third parties. I think that the OpenAtlas architecture lacks a frontend server like nginx and that in the long run it would have benefits such as: Load Balancing, SSL/TLS Certificate Management, Efficient Static Content Serving, Content Caching, Gzip/Brotli Compression, .. etc, as well as being able to add other services (for example login, or separate existing services such as IIIF). The most important aspect is that the OpenAtlas application is more protected.
Updated by Bernhard Koschiček-Krombholz 22 days ago
- Status changed from New to Acknowledged
- Target version set to 9.4.0
Thank you for your ticket. It is good to receive feedback from a user deploying OpenAtlas via Docker in a production environment. We currently use Docker for our GitHub Actions rather than for direct production deployment.
Regarding your point about the frontend server, the OpenAtlas backend container already includes a configured Apache server. If you look into the install/docker/Dockerfile you will see that we use the Debian 13 packages to install apache2 along with libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 and explicitly enable the brotli module for compression. The OpenAtlas Discovery frontend typically uses Nginx, but for the backend we rely on this Apache configuration.
We assumed that Docker users will modify the docker-compose.yaml to suit their specific needs regarding ports, database connections, or additional reverse proxies (SSL/TLS). At the ACDH institute we use Kubernetes and deploy these exact images using Helm charts which can be found in the charts folder.
I agree that improving the Docker setup for production is a valid goal. I add this to the roadmap for 9.4.0. Since this is not our primary deployment method I would appreciate your specific feedback. Please let me know which adaptations or configuration changes you recommend or need for your environment so we can develop them effectively.