7.1 Dependency Management & Build Strategy

To optimize image sizes, improve load times, and isolate dependencies, the architecture utilizes a multi-stage Dockerfile and modularized requirement files.

Dependency Split

Dependencies are split by runtime responsibility. This ensures that the web application stays slim (avoiding heavy pandas, geopandas binaries, etc) and the scheduler avoids unnecessary web-routing libraries.

Documentation-only tooling is kept outside the container requirement split. For example, the printable ER diagram generator uses its own documentation/print_er_diagram/requirements.txt so eralchemy2 and pygraphviz are installed only when regenerating that artifact.

Dependency Overlap Matrix

The following matrix visualizes the specific libraries included in each build stage. Note how base is inherited by all stages, and test aggregates everything to ensure a complete integration environment.

Generated via documentation/scripts/generate_dependency_overlap.py

• requirements-base.txt: Shared core backend foundations requested by all containers (Flask-SQLAlchemy>=3.1.1,<4.0, Flask>=3.1.3,<4.0, GeoAlchemy2>=0.19.0,<1.0, psycopg[binary]>=3.3.3,<4.0, redis>=7.4.0,<8.0, requests>=2.33.1,<3.0, SQLAlchemy>=2.0.49,<3.0).
• requirements-web.txt: Web-only stack for the API and UI (bleach>=6.3.0,<7.0, Flask-Limiter>=4.1.1,<5.0, Flask-Migrate>=4.1.0,<5.0, gunicorn>=25.3.0,<26.0, mistune>=3.2.0,<4.0, weasyprint>=68.1,<69.0, Werkzeug>=3.1.8,<4.0).
• requirements-scheduler.txt: Heavy geospatial stack required for the data pipeline (APScheduler>=3.11.2,<4.0, geopandas>=1.1.3,<2.0, numpy>=2.4.4,<3.0, pandas>=3.0.2,<4.0, scipy>=1.17.1,<2.0, shapely>=2.1.2,<3.0).
• requirements-test.txt: Testing frameworks (pytest-cov>=7.1.0,<8.0, pytest-flask>=1.3.0,<2.0, pytest>=9.0.3,<10.0).

Dockerfile Stages

The Dockerfile resolves four distinct logical build targets:

1. base Stage

   • Establishes normal Python environment.
   • Installs requirements-base.txt.

2. app-stage Stage

   • Used by the app service.
   • Installs UI/PDF system level libraries (Cairo/Pango).
   • Installs requirements-web.txt.

3. scheduler-stage Stage

   • Used by the scheduler service.
   • Installs heavy C++ geospatial system libraries (GDAL/GEOS/PROJ).
   • Installs requirements-scheduler.txt.

4. test-stage Stage

   • Used by the test service.
   • Starts from app-stage, but forcibly adds the scheduler geospatial libraries.
   • Installs both requirements-scheduler.txt and requirements-test.txt.
   • This merged image allows integration tests to test both web routes and pipeline functions simultaneously.