Managed Postgres

Postgres, or PostgreSQL, is an advanced open-source relational database system known for its robustness, extensibility, and compliance with SQL standards, making it a popular choice for complex applications requiring reliable data integrity and sophisticated querying capabilities.

Current Support

Provider	Managed Postgres
Playground	❌
AWS	✅
DigitalOcean	❌

How to use Managed Postgres

To use managed Postgres, in your compose.yaml file, use the x-defang-postgres extension to define your Postgres service. Adding the extension will tell Defang to provision a managed instance, rather than running Postgres as a service.

Required Configuration

When using managed Postgres, you must set a password for the database using defang config set POSTGRES_PASSWORD. If you do not provide the password, the deployment will fail.

• POSTGRES_PASSWORD: You can can assign the password in the service's environment variables. To learn more about how this works, read about configuration.

Optional Configuration

You can also set the following optional environment variables to configure the managed Postgres instance:

• POSTGRES_USER: The user for the managed Postgres instance. The default is postgres.
• POSTGRES_DB: The database name for the managed Postgres instance. The default is postgres.

Connecting to Managed Postgres

You can connect to the managed Postgres instance using the name of your service as the hostname, POSTGRES_USER, POSTGRES_DB, and POSTGRES_PASSWORD environment variables.

Example

  app:
    # [...]
    environment:
      POSTGRES_HOST: database
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: postgres
      # Note: by leaving the value empty, Defang will use the
      # value set using `defang config set POSTGRES_PASSWORD`
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD:
      # Note: you can create a connection string by using interpolation,
      # reference config variables by using ${<config name>}
      CONNECTURL: postgresql://postgres:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@database:5432/postgres?sslmode=require
  database:
    image: postgres:15
    x-defang-postgres: true
    ports:
      - mode: host
        target: 5432
    environment:
      # Note: by leaving the value empty, Defang will use the
      # value set using `defang config set POSTGRES_PASSWORD`
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD:

Major Version Updating of Engine

To update the database engine you can simply update the image to a later version in your compose file and apply it via defang compose up --provider=aws. In the example below, we change from Postgres 15 to 16.

Please note the upgrading will occur immediately and may result in the database being unavailable for some time.

database:
  image: postgres:15

to

database:
  image: postgres:16