Connecting to Postgresql in a docker container fro

Question

I have Postgresql on a server in a docker container. How can I connect to it from the outside, that is, from my local computer? What setting should I apply to allow that?

Answer 1

You can run Postgres this way (map a port):

docker run --name some-postgres -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword -d -p 5432:5432 postgres

So now you have mapped the port 5432 of your container to port 5432 of your server. -p <host_port>:<container_port> .So now your postgres is accessible from your public-server-ip:5432

To test: Run the postgres database (command above)

docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                     NAMES
05b3a3471f6f        postgres            "/docker-entrypoint.s"   1 seconds ago       Up 1 seconds        0.0.0.0:5432->5432/tcp    some-postgres

Go inside your container and create a database:

docker exec -it 05b3a3471f6f bash
root@05b3a3471f6f:/# psql -U postgres
postgres-# CREATE DATABASE mytest;
postgres-# \q

Go to your localhost (where you have some tool or the psql client).

psql -h public-ip-server -p 5432 -U postgres

(password mysecretpassword)

postgres=# \l

                             List of databases
   Name    |  Owner   | Encoding |  Collate   |   Ctype    |   Access privileges
-----------+----------+----------+------------+------------+-----------------------
 mytest    | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.utf8 | en_US.utf8 |
 postgres  | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.utf8 | en_US.utf8 |
 template0 | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.utf8 | en_US.utf8 | =c/postgres   

So you're accessing the database (which is running in docker on a server) from your localhost.

In this post it's expained in detail.

Answer 2

I tried to connect from localhost (mac) to a postgres container. I changed the port in the docker-compose file from 5432 to 3306 and started the container. No idea why I did it :|

Then I tried to connect to postgres via PSequel and adminer and the connection could not be established.

After switching back to port 5432 all works fine.

  db:
    image: postgres
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - "db_sql:/var/lib/mysql"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: root
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
      POSTGRES_DB: postgres_db

This was my experience I wanted to share. Perhaps someone can make use of it.

Answer 3

I already had running postgres on host machine and didn't want to allow connections from network, so I did run temporary postgres instance in container and created database in just two lines:

# Run PostgreSQL
docker run --name postgres-container -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -it -p 5433:5432 postgres

# Create database
docker exec -it postgres-container createdb -U postgres my-db

Answer 4

You can also access through docker exec command also.

$ docker exec -it postgres-container bash

# su postgres

$ psql

Answer 5

I managed to get it run on linux

• 1 first run the docker postgres, make sure the port is published, I use alpine because it's lightweight.

  sudo docker run --rm -P -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD="1234" --name pg postgres:alpine

• 2 use another terminal, access the database from the host using the postgres uri

  psql postgresql://postgres:1234@localhost:5432/postgres

for mac users, replace psql with pgcli

Answer 6

In case, it is a django backend application, you can do something like this.

docker exec -it container_id python manage.py dbshell