# Dockerising an ISS Location Tracker: Lessons from Local Development

I've been building a [data engineering project](https://github.com/bernie-cm/iss-lambda) 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](https://bernieops.com/troubleshooting-a-connection-to-an-amazon-rds-postgres-database-over-the-internet) 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

```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.