QSN default DB_HOST name

[AlpacaMax]

When I was running anubis locally in debug mode yesterday(on my puny macbook) and I clicked the seed url, it returned success but there's still no data in the database. After checking the code I realized that the default DB_HOST name is db, which is strange to me as I don't think it's a valid host name. Then I exported DB_HOST=127.0.0.1 and then it worked. Now that I think about it I guess db is just a placeholder name that is supposed to be changed when testing. If that's the case won't it be better if we set it to 127.0.0.1 or at least we add some comment in the code or some info in the development_guide saying that this value should be changed when testing?

[GusSand]

Even better don't we have a config file for all these values? like a config.yaml or json or whatever...

[AlpacaMax]

Yeah but DB_HOST in both config.py and docker-compose.yml are set to db and there's no comment anywhere explaining why. And that's why I'm asking here.

[wabscale]

I assume you are using the mindebug environment and not debug. When you are using mindebug, a sqlite database is used instead of the mariadb. Check to see if there is a database at sqlite3:///api/.data/anubis.db. You can access it with sqlite3 api/.data/anubis.db.

[wabscale]

Even better don't we have a config file for all these values? like a config.yaml or json or whatever...

It is api/anubis/config.py. It is common practice in Flask to have a config object that is used instead of something like a json or yaml file.

[AlpacaMax]

I assume you are using the mindebug environment and not debug. When you are using mindebug, a sqlite database is used instead of the mariadb. Check to see if there is a database at sqlite3:///api/.data/anubis.db. You can access it with sqlite3 api/.data/anubis.db.

I'm pretty sure I was using the debug environment. The issue I'm talking about involves line 20-25 in /api/anubis/config.pywhich belongs to the debug environment:

self.SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = os.environ.get(
    "DATABASE_URI",
    default="mysql+pymysql://anubis:anubis@{}/anubis".format(
        os.environ.get("DB_HOST", "db")
    ),
)

And also line 36-41 in docker-compose.yml:

environment:
  - "MINDEBUG=0"
  - "DEBUG=1"
  - "DB_HOST=db"
  - "MIGRATE=1"

Both files here define DB_HOST to be db

[wabscale]

If you were using the debug environment, they the services are launched from docker-compose. When that happens, all the containers are put on a docker network. They can then be connected to by the name of the service. So because the database service is called db, it can be connected to through the db hostname. Docker does some fancy things with hooking / overwriting the default dns to make these things possible. This type of thing is super super standard for different CNIs (container networking interfaces). more on compose networking here

This is pretty much how things work on prod in kubernetes too. You can define these things call services that point at pods. The services can then be connected to by their name (through coredns). more on that here

Does that make sense?

[AlpacaMax]

Yeah it makes perfect sense to me. Still that doesn't explain why it didn't work on my machine. I guess I'll do more debugging to figure it out.