Testing the RuneStone interactive Python courses server in docker

I’ve been working on setting up a Docker container environment allowing to test the RuneStone Interactive server.

RuneStone Interactive allows the publication of courses containing interactive Python examples, and while most of the content is static (the Python examples are run innside a Python interpreter implemented in JavaScript, hence locally in the JS VM of the Web browser), the tool also offers an environment allowing to monitor the progress of learners in a course, which is dynamic and is queried by the browser over AJAX APIs.

That’s the part which I wanted to be able to operate for test purposes. As it is a web2py application, it’s not exactly obvious to gather all dependencies and run locally. Well, in fact it is, but I want to understand the architecture of the tool to be able to understand the deployment constraints, so making a docker image will help in this purpose.

The result is the following :

Now, it’s easier to test the writing of a new course (yet another container above the latter one), and directly test for real.