Install using Standalone Images

Any questions, problems or suggestions with this guide? Ask a question in our community or contribute the change yourself at https://gitlab.com/baserow/baserow/-/tree/develop/docs .

Docker version 19.03 is the minimum required to build Baserow. It is strongly advised however that you install the latest version of Docker available. Please check that your docker is up to date by running docker -v.

Baserow consists of a number of services, two of which are built and provided as separate standalone images by us:

• baserow/backend:1.30.1 which by default starts the Gunicorn Django backend server for Baserow but is also used to start the celery workers and celery beat services.
• baserow/web-frontend:1.30.1 which is a Nuxt server providing Server Side rendering for the website.

If you want to use your own container orchestration software like Kubernetes then these images let you run and scale these different parts of Baserow independently.

For an example of how to use these images see the docker-compose.yml in the root of our repository.

All Services needed to run Baserow

These are all the services you need to set up to run a Baserow using the standalone images:

• baserow/backend:1.30.1 (default command is gunicorn)
• baserow/backend:1.30.1 with command celery-worker
• baserow/backend:1.30.1 with command celery-export-worker
• baserow/web-frontend:1.30.1 (default command is nuxt-local)
• A postgres database
• A redis server

Configuration Caveats

• See Configuring Baserow for specific details on the supported environment variables.
• You must set BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL (usually only when behind your a reverse proxy, see below for details) or PUBLIC_BACKEND_URL and PUBLIC_WEB_FRONTEND_URL
• You must set PRIVATE_BACKEND_URL so the web-frontend server can make direct HTTP requests to the backend. The web-frontend might not have access to the PUBLIC_BACKEND_URL or BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL, or there could be a more direct internal route it could use. (e.g. from container to container instead of via the internet).
• These images do not come with a Caddy Reverse proxy and so the BASEROW_CADDY_ADDRESSES environment variable used in other installation methods has no affect.
• You must set a SECRET_KEY environment variable for the backend gunicorn server.
• See our example Caddyfile for an example on how to setup a reverse proxy correctly with Baserow. In summary you need to:
  • Redirect /api/ and /ws/ requests to the backend gunicorn service without dropping these prefixes.
  • Serve the files in the /baserow/media folder in the backend gunicorn service (share with your proxy using a volume) at the /media endpoint. Ensure that requests with a dl query parameter have a Content-disposition header added with the value of attachment; filename=THE_DL_QUERY_PARAM_VALUE
  • Send all other requests to the web-frontend service.
• You must provide all email related environment variables to both the backend and celery-worker services. This is because the celery-worker service is the one actually connecting via SMTP to send emails.