Running Postgres as a Build Requirement in TeamCity Build

We use different Continuous Integration tools in our projects. One of them is TeamCity software. A pipeline for TeamCity can be configured easily and has two steps, such as run tests and build a docker image for further deployment. However, I needed to run Postgres before running tests. I made a research, I read the documentation and this article may be useful to close a gap for team city’s documentation.

How to run Postgres before running tests

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The documentation says that you can enable it using a docker-compose plugin. Okay, let’s configure it.

Go to Build settings -> Build steps -> Add build step

Runner type: Docker compose
Step name: Choose your own name
Execute step: If all previous steps finished successfully
Docker-compose file: your-compose.yml

Seems pretty easy, huh? Yes, but I found the following problems:

1. It’s unclear how to be sure that Postgres is up and running.
2. How to configure credentials to connect to the Postgres database.

How to be sure that Postgres is running

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The documentation says that we can use HEALTHCHECK configuration settings. Full configuration in docker-compose listed below:

With such configuration, TeamCity waits when a Postgres container will be ready to accept new connections and adds created network to TEAMCITY_DOCKER_NETWORK environment variable. NB! We should to work with our dependencies like we were inside docker-compose. E.g in our case we need to specify host: postgresand port: 5432 to connect to our database

Configuring credentials to connect to the Postgres database

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As I said before, remember to choose the right hostname to connect to the database. I wasted about one hour to realize it.

To configure it, go to Build settings -> Parameters -> Add new parameter

I use PG_HOSTNAME and PG_PORT environment variables for Postgres connection configuration and I set them in the Parameters section

Conclusion

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I hope this article will help you to use docker-compose as a build step inside TeamCity. You can run more compose dependencies inside TeamCity and use them in your tests. If you have any questions feel free to ask them.