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ckan-docker

My first Open Source Project.

I was very excited when I first heard of Docker, and coincidentally, this was around the same time I was working on a project based on CKAN, for DARD when I was working for Sopra UK.

Long story short, on this project I really felt the lack of good configuration management tool. We were only two developers and didn’t have the time to put anything decent in place.

CKAN isn’t the most straightforward system to provision and maintain, and while I got good at it I found it frustrating to repeat the same steps almost manually on every environments.

By the end of the project I’d began to look more closely at Docker and began to refactor and extend the initial Docker Images of the main project and good carried away developing more. I posted a few things about the journey at the time, and my contributions eventually became a project part of the CKAN organisation on github.

In the meantime, I started working with Sopra France on another project based on CKAN for CAF. I led the development of data.caf.fr using clan-docker, and extended it for Sopra to also run the Drupal CMS seamlessly integrated with CKAN inside Docker containers.

Both web apps share the same assets and theme (thanks to Bootstrap!) and run behind an Nginx caching reverse proxy.

A few years after this baby still purrs like a kitten, running Docker in production!

That project is the only one I know of though that has made it to production based on ckan-docker. At the time of writing this has officially been declared unsupported. Fig has been replaced by docker-compose and the Docker eco-system has evolved so much that a lot of the early bird ‘workarounds’ are not justifiable anymore.

It was a great adventure though and I hope to be doing more Open Source Ops projects in the future.