Source: 📖 Django for Professionals ch2 p27

Running manage.py commands within Docker

When using a Docker container, you should not run manage.py commands the usual way as this executes them locally. Instead, any commands should be prefaced with docker-compose exec {service}, where {service} represents the name of the service (container) in which you wish to run the command. For example, if we have a web service defined in our docker-compose.yml file, we can create a new Django superuser in this container with the following command:

$ docker-compose exec web python manage.py createsuperuser