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We are creating a Dockerfile that can spin up a Postgres database container, using this image as a basis

https://hub.docker.com/_/postgres/

Every time we test we want to create a fresh database with the production database as a template - we want to copy the database structures without copying the data in tables etc.

Can someone provide an example of doing this? I need something concrete with database urls etc.

There are some good examples here, but some are a bit nebulous to a Postgres newb.

I see examples like this:

pg_dump production-db | psql test-db

I don't know what "production-db" / "test-db" refer to (are they URL strings?), so I am lost. Also, I believe this copies over all the data in the DB, and we really just want to copy the database structures (tables, views, etc).

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    Probably the intended command was pg_dump prod-db | psql local-db which means: run pg_dump on prod-db and pipe the output into test-db. For only the structures you possibly mean pg_dump --schema-only .... See the manual or pg_dump --help for usage hints. NB: prod-db and test-db are the names of the old and new databases. Commented Oct 24, 2016 at 17:20
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    thanks! --schema-only might be useful info! Commented Oct 24, 2016 at 17:21
  • but do you know what "prod-db" and "local-db" are? are they URLs? Commented Oct 24, 2016 at 17:21
  • Well, it could be metasyntactic names; just substitute them by your actual database names. Commented Oct 24, 2016 at 17:22
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    database names are local to the machine. But you can invoke pg_dump from a remote machine, if you use the -h <IP-address_or_hostname_here> flag. You probably need to specify a username, too. And a password. And URLs are useless here. Commented Oct 24, 2016 at 17:27
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