docker-development-youtube-series/storage/databases/postgres/2-configuration/README.md

How to configure PostgreSQL

This is part 2 of our PostgreSQL series.
In this chapter, we learn about fundamentals of the Postgres configuration.

Many people make the mistakes of relying directly on Kubernetes PostgreSQL controllers and Helm charts without having any understanding of Databases.

Let's start where we left off, and review our simple PostgreSQL database:

Run a simple PostgreSQL database (docker)

docker run -it --rm --name postgres `
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=admin123 `
  -v ${PWD}/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data `
  -p 5000:5432 `
  postgres:15.0

Environment Variables

Many settings can be specified using environment variables.
I generally recommend not relying on default values and set most of the settings possible.

I personally prefer most or all settings in a configuration file, so it can be committed to source control.
This is where Environment variables are great because we can inject secrets there and keep passwords out of our configuration files and out of source control.

This will be important in Kubernetes later on.

We will not learn all or even most of the configurations in this chapter, as PostgreSQL has a lot of depth. So we will only learn what we need, one step at a time.

Let's take a look at some basic configurations here

Let's set a few things here:

Environment Variable	Meaning
POSTGRES_USER	Username for the Postgres Admin
POSTGRES_PASSWORD	Password for the Postgres Admin
POSTGRES_DB	Default database for your Postgres Server
PGDATA	Path where data is stored

docker run -d --rm --name postgres-1 `
  --net postgres `
  -e POSTGRES_USER=postgresadmin `
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=admin123 `
  -e POSTGRES_DB=postgresdb `
  -e PGDATA=/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata `
  -p 5000:5432 `
  -v ${PWD}/archive:/mnt/server/archive `
  -v ${PWD}/postgres-1/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata `
  -v ${PWD}/postgres-1/postgresql.conf:/etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf `
  -v ${PWD}/postgres-1/pg_hba.conf:/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata/pg_hba.conf `
  postgres:14.4 -c 'config_file=/etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf'