podman

Using from macOS

🚨🚨 ATTENTION 🚨🚨 I never got this working, or at least not easily. There were too many moving parts for me to follow what was going on, so I eventually switched to Docker Desktop.

Note that podman is “Linux-first”, so using it on macOS isn’t the easiest thing. I think that Podman Desktop makes it easier, at least.

Install with brew install podman
Note that podman-compose is apparently not as usable as docker-compose, so you should install docker-compose from the latest Git release:
- curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.23.3/docker-compose-darwin-aarch64 -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
- chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Running PostgreSQL

Save as compose.yml:

version: "3.8"
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16.1
    restart: always
    # This is only needed on macOS since the database files are owned by your
    # macOS user, not the Postgres user.
    # user: "${UID}:${GID}"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: bar
      POSTGRES_DB: foo
    volumes:
      - $HOME/tmp/delete_me:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    ports:
      - 5432:5432

The bit about the user: block:

If you get “Operation not permitted”, then it’s almost certainly because of directory permissions and which user is being used to create the database.
On macOS, the database files will be owned by the macOS user, not the Postgres user. If you were to do docker-compose up with that file with user: commented out, you’ll create the database folder with your own user. However, Postgres needs it to be the Postgres user, so you would need to do something like this: sudo chown -R 100998:100998 $HOME/tmp/postgres (where 100998 is the ID of the Postgres user).