Dockerising an ISS Location Tracker: Lessons from Local Development

I've been building a data engineering project using Python, Docker, and AWS to ingest data from the International Space Station location API. In a previous post, I wrote about troubleshooting the connection to an Amazon RDS Postgres database over the internet.

Once the connection could be established over the public internet, I wanted to first containerise the Python processor, and then test on my local dev system to ensure the data was being written correctly to the Amazon RDS Postgres database.

Dockerfile

FROM python:3.13.2

RUN pip install pandas sqlalchemy requests psycopg2

WORKDIR /app
COPY main.py main.py

ENTRYPOINT ["python3", "main.py"]

Unfortunately, while I was able to build a Docker image using the above Dockerfile, and successfully run the container on my local environment, in the end this didn't work when pushing the container to Amazon ECR. I will get into how I fixed this problem in the next post.