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 ... doneAttaching to postgres-test_db_1db_1  | popen failure: Cannot allocate memorydb_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 mydocker-compose.yaml:

# docker-compose.yamlversion:'3.9'services:db:image:postgres:15.2ports:-"5445:5432"environment:POSTGRES_DB:app_dbPOSTGRES_USER:app_userPOSTGRES_PASSWORD:my_top_secret_passwordvolumes:-"./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.yamlversion:'3.9'services:db:image:postgres:16ports:-"5445:5432"environment:POSTGRES_DB:app_dbPOSTGRES_USER:app_userPOSTGRES_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 ... doneAttaching to postgres-test_db_1db_1  | popen failure: Cannot allocate memorydb_1  | initdb: error: program"postgres" is needed by initdb but was not foundin the same directoryas"/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 thealpine image:

# docker-compose.yamlversion:'3.9'services:db:image:postgres:16-alpineports:-"5445:5432"environment:POSTGRES_DB:app_dbPOSTGRES_USER:app_userPOSTGRES_PASSWORD:my_top_secret_passwordCode 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.

Thepostgres:16 image uses Debian as its base. Whereaspostgres: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.

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

1. Thank you, you saved me a lot of time!

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2. Thank you for the hint, you saved me a lot of time!

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