Custom Postgres installation with Docker

Lately, i wanted to make a new test / lab environment that would be dispensable, fast to deploy and easily customisable. VM's are all nice for lab use and they served me well over the years, but they tend to be slow(er) to deploy, heavy on resources and lets face it,

So i've decided to play around with Docker. I've played with Docker in the past but i haven't done anything too serious, i just took the official postgres Dockerfile and run it to see how it works. This is how i started my whole Docker exploration, i took the official postgres docker file that can be found here and made an image. Immediately i saw that it wasn't exactly what i wanted, i wanted something less generic. The things that i would like are :

• latest postgres version, compiled from source
• easily customisable pgdata and prefix
• custom postgresql.conf settings (mostly having it replication ready)
• custom shell environment
• some extensions
• data page checksums
• easy replica deployment

So i started creating my own Dockerfile that would fill my needs and at the same time i would learn some more about Docker, 2 birds one stone kind of thing. After several hours and some testing i came up with something that was working (link at the bottom). It still needs some work to be done but i plan maintaining it for my own use so feel free to use it if you like what i've done there.

Let me explain a bit how it works.

With :

ENV PGBINDIR=/home/postgres/pgsql

ENV PGDATADIR=/home/postgres/pgdata

I can customise the installation and the pgdata directories, I install all packages i need, note that comments on joe will be deleted! Then i add postgres user to sudoers (this dockerfile is not meant to be secure, ease of use is what i am looking for when it comes to a lab postgres instance).
I -always- get the latest postgres version sources, compile and install (including extensions , documentation etc) set some environmental variables, configure postgres (postgresql.conf , pg_hba.conf) , put a sample recovery.done there so slaves can get it from pg_basebackup , install some extensions in template1, initdb with checksums,  create a replication user and finally copy a very simple replica creation script to the docker image.

How to make it work
With Docker installed its pretty simple :

to create dockers own playground network
docker network create --subnet=10.0.0.0/16 garden   
to build the image, from the directory you have the Dockerfile downloaded
docker build -t pg_dev .  
to run a container with a specific ip in our kindergarten docker network:
docker run --name master --net garden --ip 10.0.0.2 -i -t pg_dev /bin/bash
docker run --name slave1 --net garden --ip 10.0.0.3 -i -t pg_dev /bin/bash

and docker ps should look like this :

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE             COMMAND           CREATED              STATUS                PORTS              NAMES
7a38d4b11769            pg_dev              "/bin/bash"         About a minute ago   Up About a minute   5432/tcp            slave1
2c0266f942ea             pg_dev              "/bin/bash"         About a minute ago   Up About a minute   5432/tcp            master

Keep in mind that i have started playing around with Docker just 2 days ago. There might be a better way to assign static ips that I'm not aware of (yet).

Now, say that you have put some data in master and you wanna create a replica on slave1, something like this should work :

From any slave container home dir :
postgres@7a38d4b11769:~$ ./mk_replica.sh
waiting for server to shut down.... done
server stopped
29044/29044 kB (100%), 1/1 tablespace
server starting
LOG:  redirecting log output to logging collector process
HINT:  Future log output will appear in directory "pg_log".

-[ RECORD 1 ]----+--------
lag_bytes               | 0
pid                         | 37
application_name  | a_slave


The Dockerfile can be found here and hopefully it can help some people on setting up a lab fast and easy.


Thanks for reading.
- Vasilis Ventirozos