Argus production deployment examples using Docker

This repository contains a simple, but complete Argus deployment example using Docker Compose.

TL;DR

1. Type docker compose up (depending on your system, the command may be docker-compose instead of docker compose)

2. After getting the docker compose environment up and running, you must create your initial admin user, thus:

   docker compose exec api django-admin initial_setup
   

   This should create the admin user and print a randomly generated password for that user. Use this on your first login to Argus.

3. Browse http://localhost/

More details

Services

This docker compose environment brings up four services:

1. The main Argus API backend (http port 8000)
2. The main Argus frontend application (http port 80)
3. A PostgreSQL server for persistent storage of Argus data
4. A Redis server that acts as a message broker for websocket communication between the frontend and backend components.

Configuration

Minimally, you need to alter the configuration in the .env file to suit your setup (including generating the keys/random strings that should be unique for your site!).

If you are just testing on localhost, the existing settings are mostly fine. Be aware that the complete application consists of 2 web sites:

1. The frontend, pre-configured at build time to access the backend at the configured domain name.
2. The backend API server.

Changing port numbers

By default, the frontend service (which you normally visit using your browser) is configured to bind to your system's port 80, while the backend is bound to port 8000. If you, for some reason, wish to change this, set the ARGUS_FRONTEND_PORT and ARGUS_BACKEND_PORT variables in .env.

SSL

This setup does not include SSL protection of the web sites. This is absolutely necessary for production deployment. If you want to deploy to production user Docker Compose, we suggest looking at including https://github.com/nginx-proxy/acme-companion into your docker-compose.yml (or maybe preferably, into docker-compose.override.yml).

Troubleshooting on MacOS

The images referred to by docker-compose.yml are hosted as GitHub packages on the ghcr.io domain. If you're attempting to run this Docker Compose environment on Docker Desktop for MacOS, you may have problems pulling these images. If your are getting messages about being denied the pull operations, you must go into the Docker Desktop settings menu. Under the "Beta features" tab, you must enable the option "Use containerd for pulling and storing images".

What is Argus, anyway?

You can read more about Argus itself at the Argus homepage or in the official Argus documentation.