When deploying Django into AWS Fargate how do you add the local ip into ALLOWED_HOSTS

Now this works, and it lines up with the documentation, but I don't know if it's the BEST way or if there is a BETTER WAY.

My containers are running under the awsvpc network mode.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/under-the-hood-task-networking-for-amazon-ecs/

...the ECS agent creates an additional "pause" container for each task before starting the containers in the task definition. It then sets up the network namespace of the pause container by executing the previously mentioned CNI plugins. It also starts the rest of the containers in the task so that they share their network stack of the pause container. (emphasis mine)

I assume the

so that they share their network stack of the pause container

Means we really just need the IPv4 Address of the pause container. In my non-exhaustive testing it appears this is always Container[0] in the ECS meta: http://169.254.170.2/v2/metadata

With those assumption in play this does work, though I don't know how wise it is to do:

import requests

EC2_PRIVATE_IP = None
METADATA_URI = os.environ.get('ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI', 'http://169.254.170.2/v2/metadata')

try:
    resp = requests.get(METADATA_URI)
    data = resp.json()
    # print(data)

    container_meta = data['Containers'][0]
    EC2_PRIVATE_IP = container_meta['Networks'][0]['IPv4Addresses'][0]
except:
    # silently fail as we may not be in an ECS environment
    pass

if EC2_PRIVATE_IP:
    # Be sure your ALLOWED_HOSTS is a list NOT a tuple
    # or .append() will fail
    ALLOWED_HOSTS.append(EC2_PRIVATE_IP)

Of course, if we pass in the container name that we must set in the ECS task definition, we could do this too:

import os
import requests

EC2_PRIVATE_IP = None
METADATA_URI = os.environ.get('ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI', 'http://169.254.170.2/v2/metadata')

try:
    resp = requests.get(METADATA_URI)
    data = resp.json()
    # print(data)

    container_name = os.environ.get('DOCKER_CONTAINER_NAME', None)
    search_results = [x for x in data['Containers'] if x['Name'] == container_name]

    if len(search_results) > 0:
        container_meta = search_results[0]
    else:
        # Fall back to the pause container
        container_meta = data['Containers'][0]

    EC2_PRIVATE_IP = container_meta['Networks'][0]['IPv4Addresses'][0]
except:
    # silently fail as we may not be in an ECS environment
    pass

if EC2_PRIVATE_IP:
    # Be sure your ALLOWED_HOSTS is a list NOT a tuple
    # or .append() will fail
    ALLOWED_HOSTS.append(EC2_PRIVATE_IP)

Either of these snippets of code would then in in the production settings for Django.

Is there a better way to do this that I am missing? Again, this is to allow the Application Load Balancer health checks. When using ECS (Fargate) the ALB sends the host header as the Local IP of the container.

In fargate, there is an environment variable injected by the AWS container agent:${ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI}

This contains the URL to the metadata endpoint, so now you can do

curl ${ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI}

The output looks something like

{  
   "DockerId":"redact",
   "Name":"redact",
   "DockerName":"ecs-redact",
   "Image":"redact",
   "ImageID":"redact",
   "Labels":{  },
   "DesiredStatus":"RUNNING",
   "KnownStatus":"RUNNING",
   "Limits":{  },
   "CreatedAt":"2019-04-16T22:39:57.040286277Z",
   "StartedAt":"2019-04-16T22:39:57.29386087Z",
   "Type":"NORMAL",
   "Networks":[  
      {  
         "NetworkMode":"awsvpc",
         "IPv4Addresses":[  
            "172.30.1.115"
         ]
      }
   ]
}

Under the key Networks you'll find IPv4Address

Putting this into python, you get

METADATA_URI = os.environ['ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI']
container_metadata = requests.get(METADATA_URI).json()
ALLOWED_HOSTS.append(container_metadata['Networks'][0]['IPv4Addresses'][0])

An alternative solution to this is to create a middleware that bypasses the ALLOWED_HOSTS check just for your healthcheck endpoint, eg

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.utils.deprecation import MiddlewareMixin

class HealthEndpointMiddleware(MiddlewareMixin):
    def process_request(self, request):
        if request.META["PATH_INFO"] == "/health/":
            return HttpResponse("OK")