Build postgres docker container with initial schema

According to the usage guide for the official PostreSQL Docker image, all you need is:

Dockerfile

FROM postgresENV POSTGRES_DB my_databaseCOPY psql_dump.sql /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/

The POSTGRES_DB environment variable will instruct the container to create a my_database schema on first run.

And any .sql file found in the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ of the container will be executed.

If you want to execute .sh scripts, you can also provide them in the /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ directory.

As said in the comments, @Thomasleveil answer is great and simple if your schema recreation is fast. But in my case it's slow, and I wanted to use docker volumes, so here is what I did

1. First use docker image as in @Thomasleveil answer to create a container with postgres with all the schema initialization

Dockerfile:

FROM postgresWORKDIR /docker-entrypoint-initdb.dADD psql_dump.sql /docker-entrypoint-initdb.dEXPOSE 5432

2. then run it and create new local dir which contains the postgres data after its populated from the “psql_dump.sql” file: docker cp mypg:/var/lib/postgresql/data ./postgres-data

3. Copy the data to a temp data folder, and start a new postgres docker-compose container whose volume is at the new temp data folder:

startPostgres.sh:

rm -r ./temp-postgres-data/datamkdir -p ./temp-postgres-data/datacp -r ./postgres-data/data ./temp-postgres-data/docker-compose -p mini-postgres-project up

and the docker-compose.yml file is:

version: '3'services:  postgres:    container_name: mini-postgres    image: postgres:9.5    ports:    - "5432:5432"    volumes:      - ./temp-postgres-data/data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Now you can run steps #1 and #2 on a new machine or if your psql_dump.sql changes. And each time you want a new clean (but already initialized) db, you can only run startPostgres.sh from step #3.And it still uses docker volumes.