Use case

You want to run sql/plpgsql code on multiple versions of PostgreSQL to see how it performs on all of them.

This software allows you to create a build farm using docker containers with a different PostgreSQL version on each container. The builds will be made using the PostgreSQL source from upstream.

This can be used as a testing environment to test PostgreSQL features/queries/sql/plpgsql over multiple different major and minor PostgreSQL versions.

First, it creates docker containers pre-provisioned with the PostgreSQL source code. Then, inside each of them, the appropriate Pg version is built, and then a Pg server is started inside each of them.

Then you can run a test suite over multiple Pg versions and then build reports based on Pg logs to see how your test case behaved on different versions.

This can help if you’re trying to isolate a problem, reproduce it and then create a MCVE (or SSCCE if you will) so you can share it in a reduced form with others.

On these containers /var/lib/postgresql/ is the datadir for Pg, and the logs are stored in /var/log/postgresql/logfile .

Usage

./op make_image # build common docker image used for all containers
./op make_containers # create all the containers from the image we just made
./op make_pg # builds PostgreSQL with different versions on all the containers
./op make_pg_cluster # basically runs initdb on each container to create a data
                     # directory, and also provisions them with a postgresql.conf
                     # config file
./op start_pg # starts the PostgreSQL server on all containers
./op run_tests # runs the tests we have lined up in the ./t/ directory on all
               # the containers

./op report # get a report from each of the containers for 
            # all the tests that were run

Misc

./op shell_pg 9.6.8 # gives you a shell to the docker container that's running version 9.6.8
                    # under the postgres user
./op shell_root 9.6.8 # same as before but with the root user

The naming convention for containers is pg-<x.y.z> if they contain version x.y.z of PostgreSQL.

This project was tested on Ubuntu 16.04.2 using Docker 17.05.0-ce.

Inside the op script you may want to limit the number of versions you run on by modifying the array versions at the beginning of the script.

FAQ

• Q1) Why didn’t you just use the PostgreSQL build farm?

pg-docker-buildfarm can be run on a single machine, it’s not a distributed build farm.

The official PostgreSQL build farm can be found here.

I haven’t tried it but I imagine it must be more complicated to set up (probably can do more things as well).

• Q2) Why didn’t you just use Travis-CI for this?

A: Travis doesn’t provide, as far as I know, support for minor versions of PostgreSQL. Also, maybe you want to run your code on a release candidate, that’s also not available in Travis. However, Travis does have its merits as a generic, one-size-fits-all continous integration solution.

Contributing

You are welcome to send pull requests with enhancements or fixes to this project.