Deploy with Docker

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In this section you’ll see instructions and links to guides to know how to:

• Make your FastAPI application a Docker image/container with maximum performance. In about 5 min.
• (Optionally) understand what you, as a developer, need to know about HTTPS.
• Set up a Docker Swarm mode cluster with automatic HTTPS, even on a simple $5 USD/month server. In about 20 min.
• Generate and deploy a full FastAPI application, using your Docker Swarm cluster, with HTTPS, etc. In about 10 min.

You can use Docker for deployment. It has several advantages like security, replicability, development simplicity, etc.

If you are using Docker, you can use the official Docker image:

tiangolo/uvicorn-gunicorn-fastapi

This image has an “auto-tuning” mechanism included, so that you can just add your code and get very high performance automatically. And without making sacrifices.

But you can still change and update all the configurations with environment variables or configuration files.

Tip

To see all the configurations and options, go to the Docker image page: tiangolo/uvicorn-gunicorn-fastapi.

Create a Dockerfile

• Go to your project directory.
• Create a Dockerfile with:

FROM tiangolo/uvicorn-gunicorn-fastapi:python3.7
COPY ./app /app

Bigger Applications

If you followed the section about creating Bigger Applications with Multiple Files, your Dockerfile might instead look like:

FROM tiangolo/uvicorn-gunicorn-fastapi:python3.7
COPY ./app /app/app

Raspberry Pi and other architectures

If you are running Docker in a Raspberry Pi (that has an ARM processor) or any other architecture, you can create a Dockerfile from scratch, based on a Python base image (that is multi-architecture) and use Uvicorn alone.

In this case, your Dockerfile could look like:

FROM python:3.7
RUN pip install fastapi uvicorn
EXPOSE 80
COPY ./app /app
CMD ["uvicorn", "app.main:app", "--host", "0.0.0.0", "--port", "80"]

Create the FastAPI Code

• Create an app directory and enter in it.
• Create a main.py file with:

from typing import Optional
from fastapi import FastAPI
app = FastAPI()
@app.get("/")
def read_root():
    return {"Hello": "World"}
@app.get("/items/{item_id}")
def read_item(item_id: int, q: Optional[str] = None):
    return {"item_id": item_id, "q": q}

• You should now have a directory structure like:

.
├── app
│   └── main.py
└── Dockerfile

Build the Docker image

• Go to the project directory (in where your Dockerfile is, containing your app directory).
• Build your FastAPI image:

$ docker build -t myimage .
---> 100%

Start the Docker container

• Run a container based on your image:

$ docker run -d --name mycontainer -p 80:80 myimage

Now you have an optimized FastAPI server in a Docker container. Auto-tuned for your current server (and number of CPU cores).

Check it

You should be able to check it in your Docker container’s URL, for example: http://192.168.99.100/items/5?q=somequery or http://127.0.0.1/items/5?q=somequery (or equivalent, using your Docker host).

You will see something like:

{"item_id": 5, "q": "somequery"}

Interactive API docs

Now you can go to http://192.168.99.100/docs or http://127.0.0.1/docs (or equivalent, using your Docker host).

You will see the automatic interactive API documentation (provided by Swagger UI):

Alternative API docs

And you can also go to http://192.168.99.100/redoc or http://127.0.0.1/redoc (or equivalent, using your Docker host).

You will see the alternative automatic documentation (provided by ReDoc):

Traefik

Traefik is a high performance reverse proxy / load balancer. It can do the “TLS Termination Proxy” job (apart from other features).

It has integration with Let’s Encrypt. So, it can handle all the HTTPS parts, including certificate acquisition and renewal.

It also has integrations with Docker. So, you can declare your domains in each application configurations and have it read those configurations, generate the HTTPS certificates and serve HTTPS to your application automatically, without requiring any change in its configuration.

With this information and tools, continue with the next section to combine everything.

Docker Swarm mode cluster with Traefik and HTTPS

You can have a Docker Swarm mode cluster set up in minutes (about 20 min) with a main Traefik handling HTTPS (including certificate acquisition and renewal).

By using Docker Swarm mode, you can start with a “cluster” of a single machine (it can even be a $5 USD / month server) and then you can grow as much as you need adding more servers.

To set up a Docker Swarm Mode cluster with Traefik and HTTPS handling, follow this guide:

Docker Swarm Mode and Traefik for an HTTPS cluster

Deploy a FastAPI application

The easiest way to set everything up, would be using the FastAPI Project Generators.

It is designed to be integrated with this Docker Swarm cluster with Traefik and HTTPS described above.

You can generate a project in about 2 min.

The generated project has instructions to deploy it, doing it takes another 2 min.