How to connect to a Postgres server in a Docker (1.12.0) container on a Mac?

Question

The latest release of Docker doesn't use a virtual machine anymore, instead using a hypervisor to connect to the containers. This means I can no longer login to postgres with psql:

➜  postgres git:(master) ✗ docker run -d -p 5433:5432 db postgres
<sha>
➜  postgres git:(master) ✗ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                    NAMES
111f3bed4c52        db                  "/docker-entrypoint.s"   17 minutes ago      Up 17 minutes       0.0.0.0:5433->5432/tcp   zen_hugle
➜  postgres git:(master) ✗ psql -p 5433 -U postgres
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
    Is the server running locally and accepting
    connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5433"?

I have also tried specifying localhost as the host, but that results in a strange output:

➜  postgres git:(master) ✗ psql -h localhost -p 5433 -U postgres
psql: %

Does anyone know what to do in this case? Thank you.

Answer 1

I had the same problem today. I discovered that you do have to specify the -h flag for it to work:

psql -U postgres -p 5433 -h localhost

You can also use the URI style connection string:

psql postgresql://postgres:<your_password>@localhost:5433

The default is "local socket" which does not work in the case of docker.