Play with PostreSQL Through Docker

This tutorial will show you how to deploy a PostgreSQL server locally with Docker and then log into it so that you can try it out. It would be a great way to see the performance difference parallel queries can make.

Related Posts

• PostgreSQL Cheatsheet

Steps

Docker Compose

version: "3"

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:15.3-bookworm
    container_name: db
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    volumes:
      - db-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}
      - POSTGRES_USER=${POSTGRES_USER}
      - POSTGRES_DB=${POSTGRES_DB}

volumes:
  db-data:
    driver: local

You will need to create a .env with the following content (filling in values):

POSTGRES_PASSWORD="somethingHere"
POSTGRES_USER="admin"
POSTGRES_DB="some_db_name"

Pure Docker Command

Or if you wish to manually run through docker command, you could do:

docker run -d \
  --name my_postgres \
  -v postgresql-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password \
  -p 54320:5432 postgres:13

Get the IP address

Unfortunatley, trying to connect to your postgresql server through localhost, or your machine's private IP address won't work. Instead you need to connect to the container's IP address which you find by running:

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' my_postgres

Now you have the IP address (in this case 172.17.0.2), use it in the following command to log in:

psql -U postgres -h 172.17.0.2

References

• How to get a Docker container's IP address from the host