How to get started with PostgreSQL using Docker

In my previous blog post on how to get started and install postgresql on windows, well for those on Mac or Linux users or for those who want a much quicker way of getting PostgreSQL up and running, there is another way!

This will be a short blog post on how to use Docker and specifically Docker Compose to have PostgreSQL up and running in minutes.

This is ideal for local development and especially much easier for onboarding developers on the team as they may not have PostgreSQL installed and its just a case of adding this simple instruction and a docker compose file which I will go through next.

Docker Compose file for PostgreSQL

Below is the contents of a docker compose file which will get you up and running. It includes a volumes section. This is so that if you restart your machine or docker, the data within PostgreSQL is retained.

Set the username and password

The username and password I have set is using the environment variables POSTGRES_USER and POSTGRES_PASSWORD feel free to change these to your needs.

version: '3.5'


services:
  postgres:
    container_name: postgres_container
    image: postgres
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: admin_user
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ZWfBD7WV1pD99R47sfZQAMY5nQ
      PGDATA: /data/postgres
    volumes:
       - postgres:/data/postgres
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"


volumes:
  postgres:

Get it up and running

Copy the contents of the docker compose above and save it in a file such as docker-compose-postgresql.yml.

Then using a terminal of your choice and assuming you have Docker installed already, use the following command to get it up and running.

docker-compose -f docker-compose-postgresql.yml up -d

To check if its running we can run the docker process command.

docker ps

You should see something like this:

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                    NAMES
a2b2ad271a0b        postgres            "docker-entrypoint.s…"   3 days ago          Up 2 seconds        0.0.0.0:5432->5432/tcp   postgres_container

To stop it, you can use the docker stop command.

docker stop postgres_container

Thats it! Well that was a short post, but I thought I share a quick way of getting PostgreSQL running locally on your machine.