Pixies, part 5: Easy PostgreSQL setup

Why Postgres?

As our backend is going to be Django-based, we will need a relational database to store the data. Most Django tutorials assume sqlite which is a simple, one-file database which works just fine for the tutorials. The problem, however, begins when you want to deploy your application to production: because of its limitations, it might not be such a good idea. PostgreSQL (a.k.a. Postgres) is a production grade database, with a widespread use. Now, Heroku supports Postgres, but what about our dev box? It is highly recommended to use the same database during the development as you plan to use in production. There are plenty of ways to install Postgres on your machine, but I found the most simple is to install it as a Docker container. This will work perfectly regardless of what system you have, Windows, Mac or Linux.

docker-compose

Instead of manually passing flags into docker when starting a container, we will use a tool called docker-compose which greatly simplifies managing containers for your app, especially when the need to reach each other over the network or share the data persisted in some storage. docker-compose uses a file, called docker-compose.yml which describes the desired container setup for your app. Go to your backend directory and create this file:

cd pixies/backend
touch docker-compose.yml

In this module, we are going to use only one container, namely Postgres container. So let’s input this into the docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:12-alpine
    container_name: db
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=pixies
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pixies
      - POSTGRES_DB=pixies

As you see:

  • docker-compose.yml is written in yml, a human-readable file format commonly used for the configuration files. to edit it all you need is a simple text editor (Visual Studio Code will work just fine). Be careful about the spacing though, whitespaces are semantically significant for yml.
  • docker-compose.yml file format is versioned, We use version 3 which is the latest at the moment this is written.
  • It has a services section which describes the containers we need. In our case it contains only db, our Postgres database
  • For each service(container) we can specify which image to use. We use the standard, alpine-based docker image.
  • We name the container, in our case it simply called db
  • we provide environment variables to be passed to the container, in this case we pass the user name, password and database name so Postgres will be able to create initial setup for us.

Let’s launch whatever we specified:

docker-compose up -d

Docker may need to pull the Postgres image but, if everything goes well, the Postgres container should be started. Verify it:

docker ps | grep db

once it is started let’s connect to it:

docker exec -it db sh

We should end up inside the docker container. Let’s use the psql utility to actually connect to the Postgres from within the container:

psql -U pixies

Now issue a couple of Postgres commands, We are going to list all databases, connect to the pixis database, run some simple SQL and, finally, exit psql:

\l
\c pixies
select 1;
\q

These should work. Are we done with the Postgres setup? Not quite.

Exposing Postgres ports

We want to be able to access our Postgres over the network connection from our host but, most importantly, from our future Django container. In the docker-compose.yml, just after the environment section, add the following:

ports:
    - 5432:5432

This will expose 5432, the default Postgres port to the host and other containers

Persistent volumes

We want our Postgres data across multiple runs, Otherwise every time we start the Postgres container it will create the database pixies again and again. Here where Docker’s persistent volumes come into the picture. Very roughly, one can think of the persistent volume as some storage (virtual disk), which exists independently of the running containers, but where the running containers can map certain directories to. We are going create a single volume, called data and map it to the default directory where Postgres stores its data. Modify your docker-compose.yml so it does exactly that:

version: '3'

services:
  db:
    image: postgres:12-alpine
    container_name: db
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=pixies
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pixies
      - POSTGRES_DB=pixies
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    # new
    volumes:
      - data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
# new
volumes:
  data:

Observe that we create the data volume in the volumes section, which is on the same level as the services section and map it to the /var/lib/postgresql/data directory in the Postgres container. In case you are curious, the colon in for the data: in the volumes section is required, as it is yml’s way to indicate that this is a dictionary, albeit an empty one in our case.

All right, we have a Postgres set up for our dev box, so we are ready to build our Django backend. This is in the next module.

tutorial  docker  Postgres 

See also