Can I run command from a program thats based on the root host from a containerized application?

Question

I'm in a situation where I have a Django application, Nginx webserver and Postgres database that I want to dockerize, and that's no issue I can do that. But the Django application has code that calls a subprocess to run a command from a installed program on the root host, and obviously if I run that command it's not recognized since it's not installed on the docker container.

The program can not be dockerized as far as I know, because it uses docker itself. Is there any way I can make the Django Application be able to run commands from that specific program on the root host, even though the Django application is containerized?

Can this be done through some kind of network setup of the docker container?

I find it a little hard to explain, so please do ask questions if something isn't clear enough.

Answer 1

This StackOverflow question has answers that could be useful for you, in particular, mounting parts of the hosts filesystem containing the host application.

But really, it doesn't seem to make much sense to run an application in a container and then try to directly access the host system. It seems to defeat many of the reasons to containerize an application in the first place.

It'd probably much better to put the required application in the container, along with Django. I see no reason why your container wouldn't be able to run docker itself (even though for some CI/CD use cases sibling containers are preferred over docker-in-docker approach).