Postgres.app

https://postgresapp.com/

by simonebrunozzi • 5 years ago

325 154 5 years ago

postgresapp.com

KingOfCoders2• 5 years ago

I've happily used that on OSX (simpler than docker etc.), now I've switched to Windows, anything like that for Windows?

ridruejo• 5 years ago

https://bitnami.com/stack/wapp/installer

tyingq• 5 years ago

Obviously not a GUI, but WSL is pretty nice for this, even if you don't need it for anything else. You can run things like

  wsl.exe -d Ubuntu -u root /some/linux/script

From powershell or the cmd.exe console. There's a bit of fiddling required to connect from windows to the WSL postgres instance, but once that's done, it's a nice setup.

Edit: You can also use WSL as a sort of "docker like" setup, using wsl --export / wsl --import to make WSL images with different versions of Postgres, start/stop them, etc. With a small distro like Alpine, it's relatively fast.

KingOfCoders2• 5 years ago

Yes, this is what I'm currently doing (or using WSL directly together with Clion)

doctor_eval• 5 years ago

Used this for years. Can confirm awesomeness.

harg• 5 years ago

It looks nice for beginners but personally I find that a simple docker-compose file per project that spins up a postgresql container works pretty nicely and is really easy to use. I just run `docker-compose up -d` and I have a database running. Docker containers also stay out of the way of the os and I can run the right versions for whichever project.

DelightOne• 5 years ago

Makes you able to automatically run initialization scripts too.

willvarfar• 5 years ago

(Be on top of security; this was recently on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27613217)

mosselman• 5 years ago

beginners

Why is this for beginners? Because it is so easy to use? I guess I am a beginner then.

works pretty nicely

Postgres.app works perfectly and is very minimal in system requirements vs having docker running and the amount of storage it requires.

nicoburns• 5 years ago

How good is the upgrade story? That's typically the achilles heel of GUI installers (vs. installing using homebrew).

aoms• 5 years ago

I do this too, much easier

dagw3• 5 years ago

I think you and this app are solving quite different problems. For you (and most people replying) it sounds like PostgreSQL is a component in a larger app that will eventually get deployed and run somewhere else and only be interacted with via that app.

Others (like myself) use PostgreSQL as a local datastore and analysis engine. All my interaction with the database is via ad hoc SQL commands and locally run scripts and desktop applications. For this usecase, something like this is much easier to use than docker compose.

ianai• 5 years ago

What’s your use case? (Whatever you’re comfortable sharing.)

smt88• 5 years ago

I think you and this app are solving quite different problems.

No, they're not. You both just want a Postgres instance you can access locally. The major difference is that Postgres.app does not seem to do a good job of separating different databases.

All my interaction with the database is via ad hoc SQL commands and locally run scripts and desktop applications.

You can do this with DBs built by Docker as well, with the added benefit that you can erase and rebuild them whenever you want, and they're separated by project.

boros2me• 5 years ago

Love the simplicity of the app, used it for years! However when I started working with docker-compose stacks exposing PostgreSQL port I had to uninstall it because it all got confusing.

xmodem• 5 years ago

Use it and love it. I use docker too for ephemeral databases but keep the long-lived ones here.

I just wish there was a version of this for mySQL/MariaDB.

monooso• 5 years ago

DBngin (https://dbngin.com) may be what you're looking for.

Doctor_Fegg2• 5 years ago

Can't recommend this highly enough. It comes with the full PostGIS stack included, so command-line gdal, ogr2ogr, proj etc. - just add to your path and it's there for you. It runs multiple versions of Postgres, which came to my aid when Homebrew botched an upgrade: I could just copy the data files across to Postgres.app and recover them there. Overall it's so much better than installing Postgres via Homebrew.

elnygren• 5 years ago

I've always preferred Docker for setting up databases and database-like services on a development machine because then everything is nicely isolated. i.e no need to worry about random files in /etc/foo, easy to setup many versions per project etc.

This is what I've been using for Postgres:

        docker volume create postgres
        docker run -d \
          -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 \
          -v postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
          --name postgres \
          --restart always \
          postgres

(this one is just latest, but adding a version is trivial)

Doctor_Fegg2• 5 years ago

Postgres.app supports multiple versions, and doesn't put random files in /etc/foo - everything is in the right place for a Mac app, i.e. Postgres itself is in /Applications and the database is in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Postgres.

Trufa• 5 years ago

That's interesting, but my situation is that I'm developing on macOS and deploying on a linux box so my postgres setup with docker can look virtually identical.

moonchrome• 5 years ago

Docker on Mac is a performance and battery hog in my experience.

Aeolun2• 5 years ago

It also keeps yammering on and on about new versions and required updates. Just that is reason enough to get rid of it.

whalesalad3• 5 years ago

I have a few boxes at home in a lab setup (accessible externally via VPN) that I use for these sorts of things. The less crap running on my Mac the better.

That being said - when you have a handful of clients who are all running in Docker compose… it’s nice to say “down” on one, “up” on another as though I’m switching git branches.

Working on transitioning to kube so I can IaaC a lot of it - but it’s nice to have my local machine freed up.

rubyist5eva6• 5 years ago

It's so bad I just install a RHEL VM and use podman instead. The difference is insane.

bdcravens6• 5 years ago

So is any Electron-based app (like Slack and VS Code) and Chrome.

jakear• 5 years ago

Yep, consistently uses 10-20% of a core even when I have absolutely nothing related to docker running.

nightpool4• 5 years ago

I love using Docker Compose in theory, but I've found it really difficult to do local development with a "Docker only" setup on Mac, due to the performance issues with the filesystem layer (even when using cached volumes, etc). Ruby gemfiles and node_modules are big culprits here, since they involve a lot of filesystem accesses to load/install dependencies. It might be more manageable if I was just using Postgres from docker and had e.g. rubyenv and nodenv installed locally, but that sacrifices a lot of the benefits you gain from having a docker-compose setup, and I've never had any problems with managing multiple PG versions in my Postgres.app install.

Kaze4044• 5 years ago

You could look into Nix for Ruby and Nodejs. I'm not a particularly experienced Ruby developer, but having Nix take care of all versioning and dependencies for me made the whole ecosystem really accessible (in the sense that I don't need to care about most of it). Everything is still in your filesystem so there shouldn't be any performance issues, and you still get the isolation benefits from Docker (like versions and dependencies not leaking from one project to another).

cridenour• 5 years ago

I personally just .dockerignore the node_modules directory and run the front end outside of docker, but still get all the benefits of backend isolation, databases and caching layers via docker-compose, etc.

goodoldneon• 5 years ago

I've run into problems bind-mounting node_modules, so I just do an install for the image. There are the performance problems you mentioned, but also sometimes libraries build differently in Linux vs. Mac.

bdcravens6• 5 years ago

Using docker-sync helps alot, and then using it's ability to ignore certain folders (like folders with high churn like tmp and log folders) helps even more. Over time the performance story has improved, but I still find docker-sync to be the best approach for me, and I've been 100% Docker Compose for about 4 years now (even on projects that don't deploy to Docker)

dboreham• 5 years ago

Windows is a much better Docker host these days.

jimktrains2• 5 years ago

Last I checked, docker for mac also couldn't do bridge networking, which makes it a pain in having to map every service to a port on the host.

vhiremath4• 5 years ago

This is off-topic, but I feel this more for live reloading/watching of rebuilding a node/webpack app vs. databases. For databases locally, I'm doing so little write usually that it's not a big deal. For coding and recompiling/hot reloading it's a big deal, and the perf is a pain. I really love working with Docker, so I hope they make the Mac experience more friendly soon.

bob10294• 5 years ago

because then everything is nicely isolated

This is why we use SQLite for all the things. I don't even remember what a database installation process looks like anymore. It's just a nuget dependency and some code for us.

joshmarlow2• 5 years ago

Are you using SQLite in production too? I'm curious about your domain - is it a web application or something else?

ramraj07• 5 years ago

I’m yet to see people who use docker for development do it faster than People who don’t. They always end up having to mount specific folders etc which nullifies the isolAtion point and you lose so much because even something as simple as ide debugging becomes a complicated (if not impossible) task.

Kaze4044• 5 years ago

You don't have to use Docker for everything. I personally use Docker for services my application needs (Docker, Redis, etc) and Nix for the application itself.

Mehdi2277• 5 years ago

I've spent far too much time with build errors for environment issues that I do prefer docker or other environment management tools. I just have an alias for mounting relevant folders and value of docker is not isolation for my code, but isolation for system libraries.

A good example is recent mac update to big sur broke pip/python installs for a lot of people. Spending a while reading github issues to make something as basic as python and pip install numpy work is why I like docker for dev environments. There are IDEs that support docker extensions well.

I also do run most of my workloads on clusters so having things dockerized makes it much easier to reproduce a failure locally. Our CI that currently isn't dockerized occasionally has environment issues that are quite annoying to debug as I lack a good way to explore it's environment and see the mismatch.

afavour2• 5 years ago

I went down this road for a long time and eventually realised I was gaining very little from it and picking up a bunch of downsides.

Obviously everyone’s experience is different because we’re all doing different things but I mostly work with Rust and Node, I use Postgres.app as a local dev database and just run the code natively, sometimes Node via nvm when I care about specific runtime versions.

It works great. It performs better then any Docker-based solution (I’m on a Mac) and doesn’t leave me with a bunch of weird dangling images/containers/whatever taking up resources. I still like the idea of using the same Docker environment in dev that I use in production but in reality I just don’t need it.

brian_herman• 5 years ago

I love docker I just get really confused when the networking gets involved in the mix. Like I tried to make a airflow cluster with docker and I gave up.

the_gipsy• 5 years ago

With docker, I like that I can instantly switch between projects that all use postgres, each in their own container.

GordonS2• 5 years ago

I find Docker great for dev and test, as I can spin up and destroy databases from scratch in seconds - pretty useful for running tests in CI too. Also, the Docker image runs migration scripts at startup if needed, which is pretty useful.

Over in production, being consistent with dev is really nice, and having a consistent upgrade experience is a good benefit too.

EamonnMR• 5 years ago

While Postgres works fine on macs, being able to run MySQL in a docker container and not have to deal with actually keeping it running on our macs has been a huge time saver.

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

On a Mac, I like using DBngin until I need something fancier...

https://dbngin.com/

NelsonMinar3• 5 years ago

Let's see... the user could download an app, click it, and run Postgres. Or they could figure out how to install Docker, then run a terminal, then type two obscure and inscrutable commands into it. Perhaps administrator privileges are required along the way.

Sure, the Docker route is better in many ways. But perhaps you're not understanding the audience for a packaged Mac application.

bdcravens6• 5 years ago

I think it's a bad take to assume that everyone using a Mac needs a 1-2 click. If someone finds terminal commands "obscure", I'd hate to see what their SQL looks like, in which case maybe they shouldn't be running a database server.

For what it's worth, installing Docker on Mac (the audience we're talking about) is as easy as installing Postgres.app (download an installer and open). No administrator privileges necessary, unless you have a weird setup, in which case you'll run into the same issues running Postgres.app.

berkes3• 5 years ago

As long as postgres is your only external service, this is fine.

But looking at my docker list of auxillary services for 8 projects, I see redis, postgis, postgres 10, postgres latest, memcached, mailcatcher (fake smtp), ldap, a custom oauth, kafka, MySQL, piwik(matomo), in various forms and configs.

Sure, abstraction layers and adapters keep many such dependencies out of the way in Dev and testruns. But the inevitable debugging and troubleshooting does require a quick way to run such a service.

Macha2• 5 years ago

I've used these type of apps which bundle a common infrastructure component and a management GUI on Windows before when starting out, back in the XAMPP / Apache2Triad days.

I found they'd cause more problems than they solved ultimately, as they didn't provide clear upgrade paths, often had opinionated default configs which left newbies wondering why public documentation didn't work, and there was a lot of churn as to which one were currently in vogue and maintained.

WhyNotHugo• 5 years ago

Yeah, same. I usually use docker-compose per-project and manage the database (and other services) using that.

The idea of a "system" postgres is kinda wierd, since that single instance has to work with all my projects -- which might have conflicting needs.

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

Doesn't the OS X .app format package everything in a nicely isolated single file too? That's what it seems postgres.app does.

Macha2• 5 years ago

I use docker (well, podman) for postgres on my personal machine because it's the one package that causes me headaches in my rolling release distro. Postgres n -> n+1 always requires a migration process (and you can't shortcut n -> n+x), so if I spend a period of time not working on my Postgres using projects, I find I've updated from n -> n+2 or more and need to figure out how to get the old version installed again since it's a dependency of the migration tools to have both versions available.

mekster6• 5 years ago

I trust OS packages for main daemons like database, smtp, http daemons.

How are you meant to apply only security patches on docker containers?

What's the point of "isolating" daemons to avoid "random" files in /etc?

It just makes it harder to git control and back up /etc by splitting it all over the containers.

jacobwg• 5 years ago

For something similar that also supports MySQL and Redis, DBngin (https://dbngin.com/) is pretty great, from the team that built TablePlus.

anonu• 5 years ago

I would recommend DBeaver as a good client/IDE as well.

hestefisk2• 5 years ago

Yes I can vouch for that. psql on command line is also quite good…

b0afc375b5• 5 years ago

pgcli for something fancier.

lamton• 5 years ago

Datagrip and Dbeaver are my favortie tools

kiwicopple• 5 years ago

I switched to docker for most of my local dev these days, using this image for “pure Postgres with extensions” (PostGIS, pgRouting, pgTAP, plv8, wal2json):

https://github.com/supabase/postgres

It’s also bundled as an AWS image with pgbouncer

wirddin• 5 years ago

Pretty awesome. I use this along with MongoDB.app and Redis.app makes a lot of small tasks easier.

hestefisk2• 5 years ago

Had never heard of plv8. Has anyone used it for anything at scale? Quite cool with JS directly in functions although the dynamic typing could be a bit strange …

jamil73• 5 years ago

For a really nice client for macOS see Postico:

https://eggerapps.at/postico/

(not affiliated, just a fan)

b6z• 5 years ago

It's mentioned and linked in the article. And "[i]t’s made by the same people that maintain Postgres.app."

jamil73• 5 years ago

I was aware it was from the same author and brought it up, didn't realize it was linked on the homepage! Thanks.

rubyist5eva6• 5 years ago

I would recommend TablePlus as it supports more than just postgres, and is also on Windows if you need it.

Not affiliated, just an extremely happy customer.

sigzero• 5 years ago

Wow, that looks very nice.

jamil73• 5 years ago

TablePlus is also great, I keep it around for sqlite specifically.

elpatoisthebest2• 5 years ago

Postico is the only application I miss from the days when I developed exclusively on the mac.

To be fair, I use (and like) TablePlus, but it's no Postico...

mekster6• 5 years ago

What's better with Postico over TablePlus?

Eikon• 5 years ago

There’s also tableplus https://tableplus.com/

sergiomattei• 5 years ago

Table Plus is awesome and native on macOS.

kentiko• 5 years ago

Another alternative feature rich client: https://dbeaver.io/download/

ultrarunner• 5 years ago

Also a fan of Postico. For anyone curious, I emailed support asking if there would be access to multiple query tabs after purchase/activation, but got no response. I'm happy to report that it does work that way, and works well. I hope this is app is still being supported because it's overall it's quite well done.

rzr999• 5 years ago

The thing is that Postico was explicitly made for Postgres so it works flawlessly with it.

jokoon2• 5 years ago

Why use postgre instead of sqlite?

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

Off the top of my head:

Postgres is a client-server system, with full user access controls and multiple client connections.

Postgres has PostGIS (geographic data) and foreign data wrappers.

Postgres is more scalable than Sqlite and can work with larger datasets over multiple instances.

jokoon2• 5 years ago

There's spatialite.

ben-gy• 5 years ago

Heroku is by far the easiest and cheapest (free for light usage) way to get a Rails app into production.

Heroku‘a preference is Postgres over SQLite: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/sqlite3

shp0ngle• 5 years ago

I just use brew and `brew services start postgresql` but who cares

adolph• 5 years ago

Another nice db GUI is https://www.beekeeperstudio.io/

bradhe• 5 years ago

Been a Postgres.app user for years, it's been great. There are other more "sophisticated" setups that have advantages (and disadvantages!) but nothing beats the convenience, in my eyes, of Postgres.app.

Lockyy2• 5 years ago

I love postgres.app, such a great solution. It always bothered me though that https://postgres.app would just 404 whenever I'd go to look up the docs or go to install on a new machine.

Hopefully a few other people have had their lives made a tiny bit easier by the redirect I set up.

sudhirj• 5 years ago

That's really nice of you, thanks!

OJFord2• 5 years ago

[see reply]~~~I'm sure it's done with the best of intentions, but, alternatively, it's squatting, MITMing, etc. and the server should probably be rejecting requests not for the official 'postgresapp.com' hostname?

(Maybe there's not really any attack here - though downloads? - but imagine 'pay.pal' or something. AFAIK servers should be configured only to permit intended hosts, they allow '*' but I don't know when that's what you want?)~~~

sideproject• 5 years ago

Was just installing this on my fancy new M1 machine... the app itself worked fine, but I'm used to Laravel Homestead. Well, that didn't go so well. VirtualBox doesn't work on M1. Tried all sorts of combination to get Laravel, PHP, Postgres working well as a combo. In the end, it was a combination of MAMP, Postgres App and quite a few tweakings to get things in order.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

Have been developing on MacOS using Postgres.app for years. It just works, never even think about it.

fdr• 5 years ago

This was one of the more useful things Heroku ever seeded, though the maintenance in the intervening decade has certainly eclipsed the initial effort (https://blog.heroku.com/postgresapp_the_easiest_way_to_devel...).

These days I tend to use "asdf" for my Postgres version management. It's not as friendly, but I kind of like running my services (where n < 5) in the foreground myself so I can see errors in the console with ease, and I like that asdf handles all the tools where I have exacting version requirements consistently (and even a few I don't).

zapstar• 5 years ago

Postgres.app is great. It just works. And toggling between versions is super helpful too.

evaneykelen• 5 years ago

If you like to use the ‘pg’ Ruby gem in conjunction with this app then you need to use `gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/X.Y/bin/pg_config` where X.Y refers to the correct version (IIRC you can also replace the version nr by `Latest`).

mekster6• 5 years ago

Why do people consistently try to run dev tools on their local OS when there are plenty of easy and cheap alternatives to accomplish more stable, reliable and reproducible environment?

Just get a $5/mo cloud instance and run your stuff as same OS as production and let other people check your environment even while your machine is turned off and continue working on another machine without duplicating the environment.

If you still want it locally, use VMware fusion which became free for personal use lately and run a real Linux like your servers do.

I see no benefit in running stuff on local OS.

vosper• 5 years ago

I see no benefit in running stuff on local OS.

A database on localhost is the fastest way to run your tests that need to talk to a DB.

Postgres.app

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