Running linux processes as root is not a good idea. One problem or exploit with the process can give to the attacker a root shell. When we run one docker container, especially if this container is in production it shouldn’t be run as root.
To do that we only need to generate a Dockerfile to properly run our Python/Django application as non-root. That’s my boilerplate:
FROM python:3.8 AS base
ENV APP_HOME=/src
ENV APP_USER=appuser
RUN groupadd -r $APP_USER && \
useradd -r -g $APP_USER -d $APP_HOME -s /sbin/nologin -c "Docker image user" $APP_USER
WORKDIR $APP_HOME
ENV TZ 'Europe/Madrid'
RUN echo $TZ > /etc/timezone && apt-get update && \
apt-get install -y tzdata && \
rm /etc/localtime && \
ln -snf /usr/share/zoneinfo/$TZ /etc/localtime && \
dpkg-reconfigure -f noninteractive tzdata && \
apt-get clean
RUN pip install --upgrade pip
FROM base
ENV PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE 1
ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
ADD src .
RUN chown -R $APP_USER:$APP_USER $APP_HOME
USER $APP_USER
Also, in a Django application, we normally use a nginx as a reverse proxy. Nginx normally runs as root at it launches its process as non-root, but we also can run nginx as non-root.
FROM nginx:1.17.4
RUN rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
RUN rm /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d
COPY etc/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
RUN chown -R nginx:nginx /var/cache/nginx && \
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/log/nginx && \
chown -R nginx:nginx /etc/nginx/conf.d && \
chmod -R 766 /var/log/nginx/
RUN touch /var/run/nginx.pid && \
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/run/nginx.pid && \
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/cache/nginx
USER nginx
And that’s all. Source code of a boilerplate application in my github
Gonzalo Ayuso - Web Architect 