Postgres 16 Docker Workaround – program “postgres” is needed by initdb

This one cost me a whole bunch of time. Annoyingly I got a Docker version of Postgres 16 working on one machine, but a couple of days later I needed to update another and I hit this error:

docker-compose up  
Creating postgres-test_db_1 ... done
Attaching to postgres-test_db_1
db_1  | popen failure: Cannot allocate memory
db_1  | initdb: error: program "postgres" is needed by initdb but was not found in the same directory as "/usr/lib/postgresql/16/bin/initdb"Code language: Shell Session (shell)

Somewhat fortunately for me, this time around, was that this was a test setup I have used previous for Postgres testing. So I had a really slimmed down config in my docker-compose.yaml:

# docker-compose.yaml

version: '3.9'
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:15.2
    ports:
      - "5445:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: app_db
      POSTGRES_USER: app_user
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: my_top_secret_password
    volumes:
      - "./init.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/init.sql"
Code language: YAML (yaml)

That’s the original starting point, though it doesn’t matter too much which version you are starting with.

I wanted to upgrade this to Postgres 16 as part of another blog post I am writing, and wanted to capture the error message I get on the terminal if just swapping out the Postgres image version to something higher.

However, when I swapped to this config:

# docker-compose.yaml

version: '3.9'
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16
    ports:
      - "5445:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: app_db
      POSTGRES_USER: app_user
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: my_top_secret_password
    #volumes:
    #  - "./init.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/init.sql"
Code language: YAML (yaml)

And then:

docker-compose up  

Creating postgres-test_db_1 ... done
Attaching to postgres-test_db_1
db_1  | popen failure: Cannot allocate memory
db_1  | initdb: error: program "postgres" is needed by initdb but was not found in the same directory as "/usr/lib/postgresql/16/bin/initdb"
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Which totally threw me as I didn’t (thankfully) hit on this issue when recently upgrading my GitLab’s Postgres instance during a multi-hour outage.

The Fix (Err, Work Around)

So after comparing the two Docker Compose files – this one, and the working one I have for my GitLab – I found that the difference was in the working case I am using the alpine image:

# docker-compose.yaml

version: '3.9'
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    ports:
      - "5445:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: app_db
      POSTGRES_USER: app_user
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: my_top_secret_password
Code language: YAML (yaml)

That’s it.

One small change and the whole thing boots without issue.

This looks to be a wider issue with any recent Docker image that relies on Debian.

The postgres:16 image uses Debian as its base. Whereas postgres:16-alpine uses Alpine Linux as its base.

Somewhere in Debian, there is a problem way beyond my pay grade that needs to be addressed.

It actually works in my favour to use the Alpine variant, as the overall image size is smaller and I don’t need anything its fuller featured Debian variant brings. At least, not to my knowledge.