Installation¶
The release page has pre-compiled binaries for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD . The Linux binary is a static executable that can be run on any Linux distribution.
If you use macOS Homebrew, then you can install PostgREST from the official repo.
brew install postgrest
If you use FreeBSD, then you can install PostgREST from the official ports.
pkg install hs-postgrest
If you use Arch Linux, then you can install PostgREST from the official repo.
pacman -S postgrest
If you use Nix, then you can install PostgREST from nixpkgs.
nix-env -i haskellPackages.postgrest
If you use Windows, you can install PostgREST using Chocolatey or Scoop.
choco install postgrest
scoop install postgrest
When a pre-built binary does not exist for your system you can build the project from source.
Running¶
If you downloaded PostgREST from the release page, first extract the compressed file to obtain the executable.
# For UNIX platforms
tar Jxf postgrest-[version]-[platform].tar.xz
# On Windows you should unzip the file
Now you can run postgrest with the --help
flag to see usage instructions:
# Running postgrest binary
./postgrest --help
# Running postgrest installed from a package manager
postgrest --help
# You should see a usage help message
The PostgREST server reads a configuration file as its only argument:
postgrest /path/to/postgrest.conf
# You can also generate a sample config file with
# postgrest 2> postgrest.conf
# You'll need to edit this file and remove the usage parts for postgrest to read it
For a complete reference of the configuration file, see Configuration.
Note
If you see a dialog box like this on Windows, it may be that the pg_config
program is not in your system path.

It usually lives in C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\<version>\bin
. See this article about how to modify the system path.
To test that the system path is set correctly, run pg_config
from the command line. You should see it output a list of paths.
PostgreSQL dependency¶
To use PostgREST you will need an underlying database. We require PostgreSQL 9.4 or greater, but recommend at least 9.5 for row-level security features. You can use something like Amazon RDS but installing your own locally is cheaper and more convenient for development.
Docker¶
You can get the official PostgREST Docker image with:
docker pull postgrest/postgrest
The image consults an internal /etc/postgrest.conf
file. To customize this file you can either mount a replacement configuration file into the container, or use environment variables. The environment variables will be interpolated into the default config file.
These variables match the options shown in our Configuration section, except they are capitalized, have a PGRST_
prefix, and use underscores. To get a list of the available environment variables, run this:
docker inspect -f "{{.Config.Env}}" postgrest/postgrest
You can also specify a config file by mounting the file to the container:
docker run -v /absolute/path/to/config:/etc/postgrest.conf postgrest/postgrest
There are two ways to run the PostgREST container: with an existing external database, or through docker-compose.
The first way to run PostgREST in Docker is to connect it to an existing native database on the host.
# Run the server
docker run --rm --net=host -p 3000:3000 \
-e PGRST_DB_URI="postgres://postgres@localhost/postgres" \
-e PGRST_DB_ANON_ROLE="postgres" \
postgrest/postgrest
The database connection string above is just an example. Adjust the role and password as necessary. You may need to edit PostgreSQL’s pg_hba.conf
to grant the user local login access.
Note
Docker on Mac does not support the --net=host
flag. Instead you’ll need to create an IP address alias to the host. Requests for the IP address from inside the container are unable to resolve and fall back to resolution by the host.
sudo ifconfig lo0 10.0.0.10 alias
You should then use 10.0.0.10 as the host in your database connection string. Also remember to include the IP address in the listen_address
within postgresql.conf. For instance:
listen_addresses = 'localhost,10.0.0.10'
You might also need to add a new IPv4 local connection within pg_hba.conf. For instance:
host all all 10.0.0.10/32 trust
To avoid having to install the database at all, you can run both it and the server in containers and link them together with docker-compose. Use this configuration:
# docker-compose.yml
version: '3'
services:
server:
image: postgrest/postgrest
ports:
- "3000:3000"
links:
- db:db
environment:
PGRST_DB_URI: postgres://app_user:password@db:5432/app_db
PGRST_DB_SCHEMA: public
PGRST_DB_ANON_ROLE: app_user #In production this role should not be the same as the one used for the connection
PGRST_SERVER_PROXY_URI: "http://127.0.0.1:3000"
depends_on:
- db
db:
image: postgres
ports:
- "5432:5432"
environment:
POSTGRES_DB: app_db
POSTGRES_USER: app_user
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
# Uncomment this if you want to persist the data.
# volumes:
# - "./pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data"
Go into the directory where you saved this file and run docker-compose up
. You will see the logs of both the database and PostgREST, and be able to access the latter on port 3000.
If you want to have a visual overview of your API in your browser you can add swagger-ui to your docker-compose.yml
:
swagger:
image: swaggerapi/swagger-ui
ports:
- "8080:8080"
expose:
- "8080"
environment:
API_URL: http://localhost:3000/
With this you can see the swagger-ui in your browser on port 8080.
Deploying to Heroku¶
Assuming your making modifications locally and then pushing to GitHub, it’s easy to deploy to Heroku.
- Create a new app on Heroku
- In Settings add the following buildpack
https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest-heroku
- Add the require Config Vars in Heroku (see https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/blob/master/app.json#L7-L57 for more details)
- Modify your postgrest.conf file as required to match your Config Vars in Heroku
- Create your
Procfile
and add./env-to-config ./postgrest postgrest.conf
- Push your changes to GitHub
- Set Heroku to automatically deploy from Master and then manually deploy the branch for the first build