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DevOps tools

Deploy and manage PostgreSQL infrastructure

Running PostgreSQL in containers is the standard for development and increasingly common in production. Docker Compose provides a declarative way to define PostgreSQL alongside application services, with proper volume mounts for data persistence, health checks for orchestration, and environment variables for configuration.

A production-quality Docker Compose setup for PostgreSQL needs more than just the official image: it needs persistent volumes (data must survive container restarts), appropriate resource limits (memory and CPU), health checks (pg_isready), proper logging configuration, and initialization scripts for schema setup. Common mistakes include storing data in the container layer (lost on restart), not setting POSTGRES_PASSWORD, and running without resource limits in production.

These tools help you generate Docker Compose configurations for PostgreSQL with proper defaults, configure replication setups, and integrate PostgreSQL with your CI/CD pipeline. The AI assistant understands PostgreSQL-specific container concerns like shared memory settings, WAL volume sizing, and multi-service architectures.

Common problems

  • Data loss from missing persistent volumes (data stored in container layer)
  • Container OOM kills from not setting memory limits with shared_buffers
  • Health check failures using wrong pg_isready parameters
  • Initialization scripts not running because data directory already exists
  • Port conflicts when running multiple PostgreSQL containers

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