Running Falcon from a Windows Container

I haven’t shown much love for Windows lately, so I felt like doing a post about deploying a Falcon app to a Windows Server Core container. This should be pretty quick.

Let’s build our Falcon app.

Open a PowerShell and enter the following, I assume you have Python 3.6.x installed.

Create your virtual environment first.

~$ python -m venv ./venvs/falcon

Now activate it.

~$ .\venvs\falcon\Scripts\Activate.ps1
(falcon) ~$

Install Falcon and uWSGI into that virtual environment.

~$ pip install falcon waitress

Now create the folder for your code.

~$ mkdir falcon
~$ cd falcon

We will not need any additional packages so let’s freeze our requirements.

~$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

We will use the create a super simple example of a falcon app. Once the falcon code has been created save it as app.py. Since we installed waitress, which is a WSGI server that runs on Windows, we will import and use it in this example.

import falcon
from waitress import serve

class HelloWorld(object):
    def on_get(self, req, resp):
        """Handles GET requests"""
        resp.status = falcon.HTTP_200  
        resp.body = '{"message": "Hello world!"}'

app = falcon.API()

hello_world = HelloWorld()

app.add_route('/', hello_world)

serve(app, listen='*:8080')

Now you can run it with the following:

~$ python .\app.py

Navigate to the following http://127.0.1.1:8080/ and you should get back a simple JSON message. Now our app works.

Finally, we are to the point we are going to wire up the container. The Python foundation is awesome and provides pre-baked images for Windows Server Core. Here is the Dockerfile that we need to create.

FROM python:3.6.5-windowsservercore-1709

COPY . /app
WORKDIR /app
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

ENTRYPOINT ["python"]
CMD ["app.py"]

This should all look pretty standard. Now it is time to build the image, just know there will be a few warnings about the path. These are not critical for this example.

~$ docker build -t falcon .

Now let’s run it, we will use a different port to show it is working.

~$ docker run -d -p 3000:8080 falcon

Navigate to http://localhost:3000 and the message from above should be seen.

Hope someone finds this helpful and that Python runs just fine on Windows containers.

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