radial/postgresql repository overview

⁠PostgreSQL: Open Source SQL Database

This is a Radial Wheel repository for a PostgreSQL⁠ database.

When run, the database folder and permissions are created/set and then the database is initialized. Make note of the /config/postgresql/setupdb file. This file contains a single string that gets sent into postgres --single at setup for additional database commands such as assigning users, ownerships, and any other initial database setup you might want to do.

⁠Tunables

It has sane defaults (italics) so you can test it all out. Separate from the postgresql configuration located in the /config/postgresql directory, the initial database setup can be done by running with the following environment variables set:

• $DB_USER: {"tempuser"} Database admin user
• $DB_PASS: [random] Password. Don't set this and a random string will be used
• $DB_NAME: {"tempdb"} Database name
• $DB_DIR: {"/data/dbdata"} Database folder location. Should be somewhere in the /data folder to make sure it is shared properly.
• $SETUP_DB_COMMANDS: {"/config/postgresql/setupdb"} Path to file containing SQL setup commands. They must be separated by ";" and a new line, and all wrapped in double quotes to make it a single string. These are for additional user/permissions setup to the database after it is initialized.

⁠Radial

Radial⁠ is a Docker⁠ container topology strategy that seeks to put the canon of Docker best-practices into simple, re-usable, and scalable images, dockerfiles, and repositories. Radial categorizes containers into 3 types: Axles, Hubs, and Spokes. A Wheel is a repository used to recreate an application stack consisting of any combination of all three types of containers. Check out the Radial documentation⁠ for more.

One of the main design goals of Radial containers is simple and painless modularity. All Spoke (application/binary) containers are designed to be run by themselves as a service (a Wheel consisting of a Hub container for configuration and a Spoke container for the running binary) or as part of a larger stack as a Wheel of many Spokes all joined by the Hub container (database, application code, web server, backend services etc.). Check out the Wheel tutorial⁠ for some more details on how this works.

Note also that for now, Radial makes use of Fig⁠ for all orchestration, demonstration, and testing. Radial is just a collection of images and strategies, so technically, any orchestration tool can work. But Fig was the leanest and most logical to use for now.

⁠How to Use

⁠Static Build

In case you need to modify the entrypoint script, the Dockerfile itself, create your "config" branch for dynamic building, or just prefer to build your own from scratch, then you can do the following:

1. Clone this repository
2. Make whatever changes needed to configuration and add whatever files
3. fig up

⁠Dynamic Build

A standard feature of all Radial images is their ability to be used dynamically. This means that since great care is made to separate the application code from it's configuration, as long as you make your application configuration available as a git repository, and in it's own "config" branch as per the guidelines in the Wheel template⁠, no building of any images will be necessary at deploy time. This has many benefits as it allows rapid deployment and configuration without any wait time in the building process. However:

Dynamic builds will not commit your configuration files into any resulting images like static builds.

Static builds do a "COPY" of files into the image before exposing the directories as volumes. Dynamic builds do a git fetch at run time and the resulting data is downloaded to an already existing volume location, which is now free from Docker versioning. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. Deploying the same exact configuration might benefit from a single image built statically whereas deploying many different disposable configurations rapidly are best done dynamically with no building.

To run dynamically:

1. Modify the fig-dynamic.yml file to point at your own Wheel repository location by setting the $WHEEL_REPO variable. When run, the Hub container will pull the "config" branch of that repository and use it to run the Spoke container with your own configuration.
2. fig -f fig-dynamic.yml up