Connect Apache Superset© to MySql on Host

👉 Starting out with Apache Superset? ♾ ⚠️ These are the things I came accross, scratching my head for a while

Off we go:

• building Superset using the github Superset repository is easy, bút might not be the best approach if you’re not actively going to develop new features for the platform itself

  • ❌ reason being that building the docker images requires a big amount of docker resources, especially to build the Superset image itself. It requires the frontend to be built using Webpack and it seems you either need to wait for an hour or so until the static resources can be provided **OR **you should assign at least 16GB of memory to Docker. Well, in my case, neither of those options seem to be the best way forward. (see #11508 and #9880)
  • ✅ instead you can use the community-built image through https://github.com/amancevice/docker-superset (image can be found on https://hub.docker.com/r/amancevice/superset/).
    • if you then follow the examples found in the github repo you should be able to get Superset running in no-time!! 🚀 📈

• after checking out the demo with provided datasets, graphs and dashboards, you’d probably want to start using your own dataset, right?

  • so I wanted to connect Superset, which was running inside a docker container, directly to my application database (MariaDB) running on my host-machine.
  • when trying to setup a new datasource connection in Superset a database URI should be provided:
    • ❌ mysql://:@localhost:3306/<database_name>: did not work, docker could not connect using the unix_socket
    • ❌ mysql://:@127.0.0.1:3306/<database_name>: did not work, ofcourse the database is not provided on that specific container
    • ❌ mysql://:@mysql_host:3306/<database_name>: might have worked using “extra_hosts” or a specific docker network in your docker-compose.ymlbut this already seemed too much work to me and never felt like this was the out-of-the-box feature to connect to a service running on the host-machine..
    • ✅ luckily after some time, this was the answer I was looking for: “Long live the king… Stackoverflow, long live Stackoverflow!!”
      • try this URI and it should work like a charm: mysql://:@host.docker.internal:3306/<database_name> 🚀

Hope this might help!

G.