tempgres is a REST service for conveniently creating temporary PostgreSQL databases. It is intended for use from tests.

This is mostly aimed at integration-type tests you usually want to use a) a real database, and b) want to start with a fresh database for every test case. Using this REST service eliminates the setup (users, configuration, database server, etc.) which would be necessary for using temporary databases for tests locally on a development machine -- all you need is a single URL.

If you have a group of developers, you'll probably want to run a single tempgres instance in your development LAN so that everybody can share it and can use the same URL. The URL could also be baked into the default test configuration so that developers don't have to do any setup to get tests up and running.

Once the service is set up and running (see below), you can do a HTTP POST to it to create a temporary database. For example,

$ curl -d '' http://localhost:15431
tempgres-client
tempgres-cpass
localhost
15432
temp_jm1sufkdkdyn1ekifld1nyblj8vuomjz9

The response indicates that the temporary database temp_jm1sufkd... has been created on the database server localhost (port 15432) and made available to the user tempgres-client using the password tempgres-cpass.

The database will automatically be destroyed after a configurable duration, though any temporary databases that have not been destroyed when the service is stopped will stay around. All temporary databases will be named temp_....

• Haskell
• Java

This service is strictly meant for use on one's own computer or on development LANs which are firewalled off from the public Internet.

The recommended way to install on your own system is to use the container from DockerHub:

$ docker run -p 15431:8080 -p 15432:5432 -d cwconsult/tempgres:latest

To adjust the ports (15431, 15432) you will need to set the HTTP_PORT and TEMPGRES_PUBLISHED_ADDRESS_PORT environment variables when starting the container. You can also set other environment variables to control the user name, passwords, etc. See the Dockerfile and Configuration.hs for details.

You might also want to specify a fixed tag above, e.g. cwconsult/tempgres:v3.0.0

If you need customization beyond what environment variables allow, you may produce your own container image by running

$ ./docker/build.sh

This builds everything, and should produce some output akin to:

 ...
 => exporting to image
 => => exporting layers
 => => writing image sha256:f47ee2bb5dd2d1df6577439a421fe00383eb599193d395a96178fb2d2360cfba
 => => naming to docker.io/library/tempgres:latest

To run the container, follow the instruction above, but specify sha256:f47ee2bb5dd2d1df657743... as the name of the container instead of cwconsult/tempgres.