Cannot figure out how to access website on running docker container on digital ocean droplet

Hey,

So, for background, I’m mostly a front-end engineer who has some minor experience with node, express, docker, etc. But it’s not my strength. I’m trying to deploy a site that runs perfectly fine locally, via docker-compose, to a digital ocean droplet (the one with docker and docker-compose pre-installed)

I cannot, for the life of me, figure this out. It’s been a week now, at least, and I’ve even had other engineers hop on video calls with me and they couldn’t figure it out either. In the past, I’ve used AWS and GCP, and not to be a downer but those services were never so difficult to setup that I couldn’t figure it out.

Here is my setup/workflow.

I build my project using docker-compose. The command looks like this: docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.build.yml build --no-cache --parallel

I then deploy to my remote repository on docker hub, and pull that down in my digital ocean droplet. So far, so good.

Since I am just trying to get something up for now, as a stopgap, so I can test and share with the designer, I am wanting to run that same image exactly how i would locally, just in production mode and accessible by the internet. Yes, I know that probably I should just run my image via docker run imagename but I have several other services attached to it (redis, postgres) and I mistakenly thought this would be easier and save me some time to just run it this way.

To that end, I used cat to basically copy/paste my docker compose configs into the droplet.

They look like this:

The base config below sets up redis and postgres.

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'
services:
  db:
    container_name: db
    image: postgres:11.2-alpine
    # networks:
    #   - web
    ports:
      - "54320:5432"
    volumes:
      - "db_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data"

  redis:
    container_name: redis
    # command: ["redis-server", "--bind", "redis", "--port", "6379"]
    image: redis:alpine
    # networks:
    #   - web
    sysctls:
      # fixes warning when using redis with the barebones alpine image
      net.core.somaxconn: '511'

The config below runs the site in prod mode. Again, this works great locally, no issues.

docker-compose.prod.yml

version: '3'
services:
  prod:
    # build: .
    image: myimage
    container_name: prod
    working_dir: /app
    # networks:
    #   - web
    # links:
    #   - redis:redis
    # command here overrides CMD in Dockerfile. but Dockerfile requires CMD to be valid
    command: "npm run prod"
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
    # ports:
    #   - "127.0.0.1:3001:3001"
    # network_mode: host
    environment:
      - DB=development #eventually change to production
      - DEBUG=false
      # - ENABLE_IPV6=true
      - NODE_ENV=development
      - DB_HOST=${DB_HOST}
      - DB_DEV_PW=${DB_DEV_PW}
      - DB_PROD_PW=${DB_PROD_PW}
      - DB_TEST_PW=${DB_TEST_PW}
      - MAXMIND_LICENSE_KEY=${MAXMIND_LICENSE_KEY}
      - LOG_LEVEL=${LOG_LEVEL}
      - PEPPER=${PEPPER}
      # - NETWORK_ACCESS=internal
      # - VIRTUAL_HOST=consensus.local
      # - VIRTUAL_PORT=3001
      # - VIRTUAL_PROTO=https
    expose:
      - 3001
      # - 3000
    # volumes:
    #   - .:/app
    #   - node_modules:/app/node_modules
    restart: "always"

  db:
    # networks:
    #   - web
    restart: "always"

  redis:
    # networks:
    #   - web
    restart: "always"

# networks:
#   web:

volumes:
  db_data:
  # node_modules:

I’ve left all the comments in so you get a bit of a sense of all the various things I’ve tried so far.

Locally, I am using Docker for Mac, with my ip set to 0.0.0.0. I am running my web server at 0.0.0.0 as well, port 3001.

When I run my docker image in my digital ocean (ubuntu) host, i use the command: docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.prod.yml up --remove-orphans --force-recreate

This boots up the container and the linked services (redis, postgres) with no errors (with the current config). But I cannot curl localhost or 0.0.0.0 from within the host. And when I try to access the site publicly by using the ip provided by the droplet, at port 3001, nothing happens. Depending on setup, it either times out and returns and empty response, or it doesn’t connect at all (the current case with the above config). Fwiw, I have reverted to just running my host as root, because when I did otherwise I ran into permissions issues (I couldn’t run a docker container, in a docker droplet, without being root or I would get eacces errors…)

What am I doing wrong? This is driving me insane.

My current best guess is that maybe I’ve configured ufw wrong somehow and all non-ssh connections are just blocked? I followed the tutorial here https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-setup-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-an-ubuntu-and-debian-cloud-server which seemed to me to just be a standard thing to do when setting up a new droplet, but now I’m concerned I broke something (I am not at all familiar with ufw).