Separate .py configuration files and persistent volume at /app/data

[joonashak]

Hi, all!

While conjuring a deployable Weblate setup with Ansible, I ran into a problem with configuration files and persistent volumes. Specifically, I'm looking to setup Weblate behind a reverse proxy acting as an SAML SP and using Django's remote user authentication. In order to have Django read the username from HTTP headers set by the reverse proxy and populate new users e-mail addresses from those headers I need to mount the following files at /app/data:

• settings-override.py
• python/custom-remote-user-middleware.py
• python/custom-remote-user-backend.py

These files are under version control and to deploy them with Ansible, I build a new docker image upon Weblate's official one like so (here, weblate directory would contain the files above):

FROM weblate/weblate:5.9.2.2

COPY weblate /app/data

However, according to the docs, a persistent volume should be mounted at /app/data. This leads to a conflict in that if I mount said persistent volume, it will contain the three configuration files as they are at the time of the first run of the container. Upon modifying the files, building a new version of the image, and running it, the old configuration files in the volume will persist over the newer ones in the image.

How would you deal with this situation? Is it possible to separate the locations of these configuration files and whatever Weblate writes in /app/data that needs to be persisted? I would very much prefer not having to implement additional steps to copy configuration into the volume as I feel that it would be the kind of thing that could eventually cause confusion, version mismatches, etc.

Thanks for making Weblate! 🤗

[nijel]

If you want to customize the Docker container, there is a documented way to do that, see https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admin/install/docker.html#overriding-settings-by-extending-the-docker-image