An Experimental Postgres Container Image Running on AlmaLinux

I'm releasing an experimental version of our #postgres #docker image built on top of AlmaLinux. It is, for the most part a drop in replacement for the official postgres docker image that runs on Debian. Please note the code is really experimental. It works for my use case and I've done some rudimentary testing on it. It's licensed under the GNU GPLv3. As usual, all caveats with open source software apply. Use it at your own risk.

But if you do, please do drop me a note on your experience, and if there's anything I can do to improve it.

You can build the image from this #GitHub link: https://github.com/sumanthvepa/experiments/tree/main/docker/basics/postgres-test

Some Background

So why build a custom docker image for postgres, when there is already an official one. Some background needed. Last year, we decided to standardize on #almalinux for all our servers. That decision was driven by need to migrate away from CentOS. We needed an RPM based distribution, since there was lot of sysadmin tooling built around it.

We migrated all physical servers about a year ago. Then all our VMs to #almalinux about six months ago. Having Debian as a base image, like most docker containers do, was a problem for me. Our tooling works best with RPM based distros. And while its not a big deal to use Debian or derivatives, (indeed our desktops are all standardized to Ubuntu), the inconsistency creates friction in development and deployment that I did not want.

Last month, I finally got round to migrating all our #docker #container images to using almalinux:9-minimal as the base image. As part of the migration, we've decided to also dockerize our database setup. We use #postgres as our primary database. Developers get their own copies of the the application's databases, seeded with appropriate test data. In the past we've just shiped a standard VM image, that they could run on their laptops for development.

We're now rolling out docker images with the same setup. It's much more lightweight and less finicky than shipping a VM image. The postgres image built on almalinux:9-minimal is part of this endeavour. All our app images are using this base image to ship a dev database to our developers.

Once we test further, I'll be rolling out postgres on docker for all our production databases.