Building a Dockerized World News Application with FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Nginx

Abayomi — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:54:27 +0000

Introduction

In this article, I walk through building a full-stack world news application that fetches real-time headlines using a free external API. The project demonstrates containerization, backend development, frontend UI, database integration, and DevOps best practices.

🧩 Project Architecture

The system consists of four main components:

Frontend (Nginx) – Displays news articles in a beautiful UI

Backend (FastAPI) – Fetches news from NewsAPI and stores it in PostgreSQL

Database (PostgreSQL) – Persists news articles

External API (NewsAPI.org) – Provides real-world news data

🐳 Containerization with Docker

Each component runs in its own container, orchestrated using Docker Compose. This setup ensures portability, reproducibility, and clean separation of concerns.

🔐 Managing Secrets with Environment Variables

Sensitive data such as database credentials and API keys are stored in a .env file, keeping secrets out of the source code.

🎨 Frontend Design

The frontend is built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with a modern gradient UI and responsive news cards.

🗄️ Backend and Database Integration

FastAPI retrieves news articles and stores them in PostgreSQL using SQLAlchemy ORM. This design allows future features such as bookmarks and analytics.

📦 Docker Networking and Volumes

Docker bridge networking enables communication between containers, while named volumes ensure persistent PostgreSQL data storage.

🚀 Conclusion

This project demonstrates real-world DevOps and full-stack skills, including API integration, container orchestration, database persistence, and frontend development. It serves as a strong portfolio project for cloud and DevOps engineering roles.

🔗 GitHub Repository

👉 https://github.com/YomiHubHub/world-news-app.git

Building a Fully Dockerized User Feedback Application with Flask and PostgreSQL

Abayomi — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:20:11 +0000

Introduction

In this project, I built a full-stack web application using Docker to demonstrate containerization concepts including Dockerfiles, Docker Compose, volumes, networking, and environment variables.

The application allows users to submit feedback through a web interface, which is stored in a PostgreSQL database running in a Docker container.

Project Architecture

The system consists of three services:

Frontend (HTML/CSS/JS served via Nginx)
Backend (Flask REST API)
PostgreSQL Database

All services run in isolated containers connected through a custom Docker network.

Dockerfile Explanation

Backend Dockerfile

Base image: python:3.11-slim
Installs Python dependencies
Exposes port 5000
Runs Flask app

Frontend Dockerfile

Base image: nginx:alpine
Copies static files into Nginx web directory
Exposes port 80

Docker Compose Orchestration

Docker Compose was used to orchestrate multiple containers:

PostgreSQL database
Flask backend API
Nginx frontend server

Service dependencies were defined using depends_on, and a custom Docker network enabled inter-container communication.

Volumes and Networking

A Docker volume (pgdata) was created to persist PostgreSQL data.

A custom network (feedback-net) allows containers to communicate using service names instead of IP addresses.

Environment Variables

Sensitive data such as database credentials were stored in a .env file and injected into containers using Docker Compose.

This avoids hardcoding secrets in the source code.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

One challenge was understanding the difference between Docker internal networking and browser networking. Docker service names work inside containers, but browsers must use localhost when accessing exposed ports.

Another lesson was ensuring database persistence using Docker volumes.

Conclusion

This project demonstrated real-world Docker usage, including multi-container orchestration, persistent storage, environment configuration, and networking. It highlights how Docker simplifies deploying full-stack applications.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE DIAGRAM

+--------------------+
| Browser |
+---------+----------+
|
v
+--------------------+
| Frontend (Nginx) |
| Container :8080 |
+---------+----------+
|
v
+--------------------+
| Backend (Flask) |
| Container :5000 |
+---------+----------+
|
v
+--------------------+
| PostgreSQL Database |
| Docker Volume pgdata|
+--------------------+

you can access the full project in my github repo at;
https://github.com/YomiHubHub/user-feedback-docker.git

Forem: Abayomi

Building a Dockerized World News Application with FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Nginx

Building a Fully Dockerized User Feedback Application with Flask and PostgreSQL

Introduction

Project Architecture

Dockerfile Explanation

Backend Dockerfile

Frontend Dockerfile

Docker Compose Orchestration

Volumes and Networking

Environment Variables

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Conclusion