Why there's no way to use this without docker?

Technical Help
1

Hello friends,

I wanted to install baserow both for development (I’m an experienced Django develper) and also for testing it in a real server. I have observerd by reading the documentation that there are no instructions for running this either on development or production without docker.

Actually there are some old instructions for Ubuntu 18.04 without docker but these have been deprecated.

Can you clarify why you don’t support a no-docker installation both for development and for production? I think that nowadays (we are almost 2023) the docker craze has passed and a lot of people (including me) avoid docker like hell.

I actually tried running the dev version without docker in my windows PC and it was very easy, the only problems I encountered were the lack of documentation on setting a bunch of env vars.

Thank you and kind regards,
Serafeim

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2

Hi @Serafeim , fundamentally right now we only want to officially support docker and derivative installation methods to reduce our support burden. It is completely possible as you’ve found out to run Baserow without docker, and our old guide is a good starting point. It’s just we don’t have the resources to make sure this method works still for every single release.

In the future we plan to offer non-docker installations methods via system package managers etc. If you have any specific suggestions then we’d love to hear them. For example i’d love to get Baserow supported on say podman etc.

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3

Thank you @nigel for the answer. I understand why it’s problematic to have instructions for lots of different systems & distros and why docker is an attractive solution.

However we can do much better without too much work. My recommendation would be to have a small page that would mention the requirements of baserow and any needed configuration in order to start it succesfully.

For example, something like:

  1. Requirements for non-docker installation
  • Postgresql
  • Redis
  • Python
  • Nodejs
  1. Before starting the app you need to set the following env vars:
  • database url
  • redis url
  • backend url
  • frontend url
  1. To start the app you need to start the following services
  • backend python server
  • frontend node.js server
  • celery worker

This would be enough for an experienced user to install, configure and start the application.

Kind regards,
Serafeim

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