Spinning Up PostgreSQL with Docker Compose + Dashboard

Hello, database lovers! (I know that doesn’t really exist, but hey — I'm trying to break the ice here 🫠)

I want to share a script to spin up PostgreSQL using docker-compose, which can be useful for anyone
looking for something really simple: just get it running, with a pretty dashboard to visualize data and run some queries too.

Without further ado, let’s get to the code:

services:
  database_postgres:    
    image: postgres:latest
    ports:
      - 5432:5432
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
      POSTGRES_USER: username
      POSTGRES_DB: database_name 
    volumes:
      - ${HOME}/postgres-data/:/var/lib/postgresql/data    

  pgweb:
    container_name: pgweb
    restart: always
    image: sosedoff/pgweb
    ports:
      - 8081:8081
    links:
      - database_postgres:database_postgres
    environment:
      - PGWEB_DATABASE_URL=postgres://username:password@database_postgres:5432/database_name?sslmode=disable
    depends_on:
      - database_postgres

🛠 Explaining in Detail

database_postgres

Nothing new under the sun here. Just some variables to initialize the database with a user.

But the trick is in the volumes:

Here we make sure the data is saved in a directory inside your HOME,

so all database data will persist there.

👉 This way, if you run docker-compose down (or docker compose down, depending on your version),

you won’t lose your data.

It's not ideal for production, but it can help you in a lot of cases! 😂

pgweb (Dashboard)

We’ve got two cool things here:

• The connection URL is passed via environment variable, which is super convenient.
• links creates a connection between the services — it defines an alias, allowing the pgweb container to access the database_postgres by name.

Also, depends_on ensures that the database starts before the dashboard,

which helps prevent connection issues.

🚀 Running Everything

After running a simple:

docker-compose up

You can access your dashboard in the browser at:

http://localhost:8081/

There you can run queries or just visualize your data — all right in your browser,

no need to install anything else.

✌️ That’s it!

I hope you found this article useful.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out in the comments 🤙