Why isn't Docker Compose honoring my POSTGRES_USER environment variable?

Question

I know lots of questions sound like this, and they all have the same answer: delete your volumes to force it to reinitialize.

The problem is, I'm being careful to delete my volumes, but it's consistently spinning up the container incorrectly every time.

My docker-compose.yml

version: "3.1"
services:
  db:
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=mydb
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=changeme
      - POSTGRES_USER=myuser
    image: postgres

My process:

$ docker volume ls
DRIVER   VOLUME NAME
$ docker-compose up -v # or docker-compose up --force-recreate

yet it always creates the "postgres" user instead of myuser. The output when it starts up shows that it "will be owned by user 'postgres'" and I can only docker exec as postgres, not my user.

The instructions seem very straightforward. Am I missing something, or is this a bug?

What happens when you use the compose file above?

Because that is the way it is supposed to be. See here postgres image and read the section POSTGRES_USER. — Adrian Klaver
– Adrian Klaver, Commented Dec 29, 2021 at 0:36
Do you mean that it creates a database user called 'postgres,' or a Linux user called 'postgres'? To my knowledge, the POSTGRES_USER variable only controls the first thing, and there isn't a way to control the second thing in the official Docker image. — Nick ODell
– Nick ODell, Commented Dec 29, 2021 at 0:36
It seems like you probably shouldn't need docker exec at all here. "Get a shell inside a database" doesn't seem like an ordinary use case, and if you do it shouldn't matter what Linux user you are so long as the filesystem permissions match up. I wouldn't worry about this use case, and just connect to the database with psql or a language-native client library. — David Maze
– David Maze, Commented Dec 29, 2021 at 11:58

SebDieBln · Accepted Answer · 2021-12-29 01:13:14Z

1

I can only docker exec as postgres, not myuser

The environment variable POSTGRES_USER controls the database user, not the linux user. Take a look at the chapter Arbitrary --user Notes in the documentation to learn how to change the linux user.

answered Dec 29, 2021 at 1:13

SebDieBln

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