[SOLVED] Adding postgress connections to pgadmin in docker file

Adding postgress connections to pgadmin in docker file

Is there a way to pre-configure pgadmin (maybe via env variables) with some server connections?

Say you have this docker-compose.yml, something like PGADMIN_CONNECTIONS env variable in this example? (PGADMIN_CONNECTIONS is probably not a valid ENV variable, it's just an ilustration)

version: '3'
services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres
    hostname: postgres
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: dbuser
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: dbpass
      POSTGRES_DB: TEST_SM

  pgadmin:
    image: dpage/pgadmin4
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    environment:
      PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL: pgadmin4@pgadmin.org
      PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD: admin

      ??PGADMIN_CONNECTIONS: dbuser:dbpass@postgres:5432

Solution

You need to define a servers.json file to configure connections. It's quite well documented here.

The default path inside the container is /pgadmin4/servers.json. You could either COPY your own version of the servers.json file into a newly built image, or bind mount the file into the container when it is run.

The password cannot be passed to the pgadmin through JSON, but a file containing the password is referenced in the example below. See below for further information.

You can find an example structure for the servers.json file below:

{
  "Servers": {
      "1": {
          "Name": "pgadmin4@pgadmin.org",
          "Group": "Servers",
          "Host": "magic_db",
          "Port": 5432,
          "MaintenanceDB": "postgres",
          "Username": "postgres",
          "PassFile": "/pgpass",
          "SSLMode": "prefer"
      }
  }
}

The /pgpass requires the following structure:

hostname:port:database:username:password

So for the example above it would be:

magic_db:5432:postgres:postgres:secretpassword

Note: Password was changed to PassFile in newer versions of pgadmin as seen here.