pgserver is the base server image. It is basically apt-get install postgresql-9.1, with a "docker" user, and a "docker" database already created.
The following command can be used to build the image:
> docker build -t pgserver pgserver
The image provides five commands:
configure,build,run,restore- and
psql.
configure takes three arguments: a new database name, a username, and a
password. Once the container exits, you can commit it to a new image.
> docker run pgserver configure <database> <user> <password>
> docker commit `docker ps -l -q` <image>
restore is used to temporarily restore a database cluster dump and inspect it
with psql. Assuming the file to restore and inspect is in the current
directory:
> docker run -t -i -v `pwd`:/in pgserver restore /in/<filename>
run simply starts the PostgreSQL server. See pgserver.sh for an example
that use the run command then spawn a local psql process to connect to the
server. psql directly starts a psql process within the container.
> docker run -d pgserver run
> docker run -t -i pgserver psql
If a file /initial.sh is available in the image, it is executed before
running the server. Its purpose is to provide another way to create the /data
directory. A second argument can be given and will be passed the script (e.g.
to give it some URL from which to fetch a tarball).
> docker run -d pgserver run http://example.com/base.tar.gz
To keep the PostgreSQL cluster around, and possibly reuse it in the next run of
the image, a volume called /data can be given to the container, e.g.:
> docker run -t -i -v `pwd`/data:/data pgserver psql
When the container sees a /data directory, it will use it instead of the
cluster that already exists within the image.
One possible way to create initially the local data directory is to use
docker cp, e.g.:
> docker run pgserver true
> docker cp `docker ps -l -q`:/var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main .
> mv main data
where a62681994e1f is the container ID of a previous run.
> docker run pgserver
> docker ps -l
A complementary way to create the local data is to provide a build.sh
script and use the build command:
> docker run -v `pwd`/build:/build pgserver build
> docker cp `docker ps -l -q`:/var/lib/postgresql/9.1/main .
> mv main data
This makes it possible to initialize the cluster in a clean way (i.e. the
server is stopped properly with service postgresql stop).
pgprimary is similar to pgserver (and it is built on top of it), but has
WAL archiving enabled. Read its Dockerfile to see how to configure a new
image for yourself.