I always find it complicated to remember how to start/stop postgres since I have different setups in different places, so I figured it would be convenient to centralize that knowledge so I can come back to it. Below is the cheatsheet :)

Disclaimer: This has been run in Ubuntu 18.04.

Running Postgres locally

To start the postgres server:

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

To stop the server:

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql stop

Running Postgres in Docker

To download and run docker as a Docker container:

docker pull postgres
mkdir -p $HOME/docker/volumes/postgres
docker run --rm   --name pg-docker -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=docker -d -p 5432:5432 -v $HOME/docker/volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data postgres

To stop it, simply kill the container. Some useful commands:

docker container ls
docker stop <container>
docker kill <container>

And to connect…

psql -h localhost -U postgres -d postgres