Python & Django: Working on a chroot jail to run a single bash script

Question

I am facing the following problem and I am not sure if my approach is anywhere near 'right'.

I've built a Django application that handles students' assignments for a programming subject at university. The original version of this application ( https://github.com/elcoya/seal ) used a chroot'd daemon to get the code, delivered by the students, place a bash script along-side that code and execute de bash, which could contain any kind of opeartions, like building and testing the students' code. So far... so good. However, running this daemon was a bit of a headache. Since it ran within a jail, the binded /proc, within that jail, became obsolete every time the server was restarted (it was restarted from time to time :( ) or some error occur in the daemon, the process died or was killed, and therefor, stop doing it's job of "correcting" the students' deliveries.

To prevent this errors from happening, and have a more trust worthy automatic correction service, I would like to install a ' django-kronos ' task (which runs from the crontab in the server) to do the same job. This would be great, but that would mean that from my Django stack code, I would need to move into the chroot to run the mentioned bash script.

SO suggests this post, but it is from 2012, and it kind of advises against what I am trying to do. Am I missing something here? Is os.chroot(/path/to/jail) the way to go?

Answer 1

You could run your user scripts inside a Docker container. Docker gives you all the benefit of of a jail and much more. For instance, it can restart a container for you if it the host running it were to be rebooted: https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/start-containers-automatically/