How to Containerize a Gradio App with Docker: A Step-by-Step Guide

Introduction

Building and deploying machine learning apps can sometimes be a complex task, but using Gradio, a Python library for quickly building interactive web apps for your ML models, simplifies it significantly. To make your app easily deployable across different environments, containerizing it using Docker is a perfect solution. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to containerize a Gradio app using Docker, ensuring that it runs consistently on any system.

Why Containerize a Gradio App?

Containerization with Docker brings several benefits:

• ✅ Portability: Once containerized, the app can run on any system that has Docker installed, without worrying about the dependencies or environment.
• ✅ Consistency: Ensures that the app behaves the same regardless of where it is deployed.
• ✅ Simplified Deployment: Containers simplify the process of scaling and deploying applications to the cloud or on-premise.

Now, let's go step by step to containerize your Gradio app.

Prerequisites

Before you start, ensure that you have the following installed on your machine:

• Docker installed ☑️

Step 1: Create Gradio App

Let’s start by creating a basic Gradio app. For demonstration purposes, we’ll build a simple app that takes an input and returns the uppercase version of the text.

Create a new file named app.py with the following content:

# Import packages
import gradio as gr

# Define function
def to_uppercase(text):
    return text.upper()

# Create Gradio interface
interface = gr.Interface(
    fn=to_uppercase,
    inputs="text",
    outputs="text",
    title="Text Uppercase Converter",
    description="Enter some text and see it converted to uppercase."
)

# Launch interface
interface.launch()

Step 2: Create requirements.txt File

To manage your Python dependencies, especially when working with Docker, it’s a good practice to create a requirements.txt file. This file will list all the dependencies needed to run your app.

In the same directory as your app.py, create a requirements.txt file with the following content:

gradio

Step 3: Write Dockerfile

The Dockerfile is a text document that contains all the commands required to assemble your app into a Docker image. Here’s a basic Dockerfile for your Gradio app:

# Step 1: Use the official Python image from Docker Hub
FROM python:3.9-slim

# Step 2: Set the working directory in the container
WORKDIR /app

# Step 3: Copy the current directory contents into the container at /app
COPY . /app

# Step 4: Install the Python dependencies from requirements.txt
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt


# Step 5: Expose port 7860 for Gradio
EXPOSE 7860

# Step 6: Set environment variables
ENV GRADIO_SERVER_NAME="0.0.0.0"

# Step 7: Command to run the Gradio app
CMD ["python", "app.py"]

Let’s break down what each step does: