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Quickstart (Experimental Docker Stack)

This Docker stack is intended for local experimentation, development, and exploration only.
It is not hardened, secured, or tuned for production use.

The goal is to provide a fast, reproducible environment for: - Exploring schemas and data - Prototyping ETL / ORM logic - Testing materialized views, loaders, and queries - Running notebooks against a local PostgreSQL instance

What this stack provides

When started with the appropriate profile, this stack runs:

  • PostgreSQL (cava-database)
  • Custom-built image (see docker/postgres/Dockerfile)
  • Persistent storage via Docker volumes
  • pgAdmin (pgadmin)
  • Web UI for inspecting and querying PostgreSQL
  • JupyterLab (cava-jupyter-notebook, optional)
  • Notebook environment wired to the same database

All services communicate on a dedicated Docker bridge network (cava-network).

Prerequisites

You’ll need:

  • Docker Desktop (or Docker Engine + Compose v2)
  • docker compose available on your PATH
  • A .env file in the docker/ directory

Environment configuration

Create a .env file alongside docker-compose.yml, for example:

POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
POSTGRES_DB=cava

HOST=localhost
HTTP_TYPE=http

PYTHON_BIND_MOUNT=/absolute/path/to/your/code_or_data

These credentials are not secure and are intentionally simple for local use.

Starting the stack

From the docker directory

Database + pgAdmin only

docker compose --profile default up -d

Database + pgAdmin + Jupyter

docker compose --profile jupyter up -d