Build postgres docker container with initial schema

Question

I\'m looking to build dockerfiles that represent company databases that already exist. Similarly, I\'d like create a docker file that starts by restoring a psql dump.

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Answer 1

As said in the comments, @Thomasleveil answer is great and simple if your schema recreation is fast. But in my case it's slow, and I wanted to use docker volumes, so here is what I did

1. First use docker image as in @Thomasleveil answer to create a container with postgres with all the schema initialization

Dockerfile:

FROM postgres
WORKDIR /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d
ADD psql_dump.sql /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d
EXPOSE 5432

2. then run it and create new local dir which contains the postgres data after its populated from the “psql_dump.sql” file: docker cp mypg:/var/lib/postgresql/data ./postgres-data

3. Copy the data to a temp data folder, and start a new postgres docker-compose container whose volume is at the new temp data folder:

startPostgres.sh:

rm -r ./temp-postgres-data/data
mkdir -p ./temp-postgres-data/data
cp -r ./postgres-data/data ./temp-postgres-data/
docker-compose -p mini-postgres-project up

and the docker-compose.yml file is:

version: '3'
services:
  postgres:
    container_name: mini-postgres
    image: postgres:9.5
    ports:
    - "5432:5432"
    volumes:
      - ./temp-postgres-data/data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Now you can run steps #1 and #2 on a new machine or if your psql_dump.sql changes. And each time you want a new clean (but already initialized) db, you can only run startPostgres.sh from step #3. And it still uses docker volumes.

Answer 2

According to the usage guide for the official PostreSQL Docker image, all you need is:

Dockerfile

FROM postgres
ENV POSTGRES_DB my_database
COPY psql_dump.sql /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/

The POSTGRES_DB environment variable will instruct the container to create a my_database schema on first run.

And any .sql file found in the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ of the container will be executed.

If you want to execute .sh scripts, you can also provide them in the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ directory.