Docker with postgresql in flask web application (part 2) - postgresql

Question

I am building a Flask application in Python. I'm using SQLAlchemy to connect to PostgreSQL.
In the flask application, I'm using this to connect SQLAlchemy to PostgreSQL
engine = create_engine('postgresql://postgres:[mypassword]#db:5432/employee-manager-db')
And this is my docker-compose.yml
version: '3.8'
services:
backend:
build:
context: .
dockerfile: Dockerfile
ports:
- 8000:8000
volumes:
- .:/app
links:
- db:db
depends_on:
- pgadmin
db:
image: postgres:14.5
restart: always
volumes:
- .dbdata:/var/lib/postgresql
hostname: postgres
environment:
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: [mypassword]
POSTGRES_DB: employee-manager-db
pgadmin:
image: 'dpage/pgadmin4'
restart: always
environment:
PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL: [myemail]
PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD: [mypassword]
ports:
- "5050:80"
depends_on:
- db
I can do "docker build -t employee-manager ." to build the image. However, when I do "docker run -p 5000:5000 employee-manager" to run the image, I get an error saying
conn = _connect(dsn, connection_factory=connection_factory, **kwasync)
psycopg2.OperationalError: could not translate host name "db" to address: Try again
Does anybody know how to fix this? Thank you so much for your help

Answer 1

Your containers are on different networks and that is why they don't see each other.
When you run docker-compose up, docker-compose creates a separate network and puts all the services defined inside docker-compose.yml on that network. You can see that with docker network ls.
When you run a container with docker run, it is attached to the default bridge network, which is isolated from other networks.
There are several ways to fix this, but this one will serve you in many other scenarios:
Run docker container ls and identify the name or ID of the db container that was started with docker-compose
Then run your container with:
# ID_or_name from the previous point
docker run -p 5000:5000 --network container:<ID_or_name> employee-manager
This attached the new container to the same network as your database container.
Other ways include creating a network manually and defining that network as default in the docker-compose.yml. Then you can use docker run --network <network_name> ... to attach other containers to that network.

Answer 2

docker run doesn't read any of the information in the docker-compose.yml file, and it doesn't see things like the Docker network that Compose automatically creates.
In your case you already have the service fully-defined in the docker-compose.yml file, so you can use Compose commands to build and restart it
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d # will delete and recreate changed containers
(If the name of the image is important to you – maybe you're pushing to a registry – you can specify image: alongside build:. links: are obsolete and you should remove them. I'd also avoid replacing the image's content with volumes:, since this misses any setup or modification that's done in the Dockerfile and it means you're running untested code if you ever deploy the image without the mount.)