following this guide

docker container deployment failing for some reason with the migrate functionality, so for now that's been rolled back to a local instance of the REST API hitting a containerized postgres, which was manually deployed using docker run --name some-postgres -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<postgres pass> -d postgres

set the environment variables needed for Go to connect to the postgres instance

• export POSTGRES_USER=<postgres user>
• export POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<postgres password>
• export POSTGRES_DB=<postgres database>

then connect to the postgres container either with:

• another container
  • docker run -it --rm --link some-postgres:postgres postgres psql -h postgres -U postgres
  • create database <database name> -- could just use the default postgres database
  • \connect <database name>
• pgadmin

then manually execute the sql command in up.sql to create the items table