Quickstart

This section describes how to test a PostgreSQL cluster on your laptop/computer using CloudNativePG on a local Kubernetes cluster in Kind or Minikube.

Like any other Kubernetes application, CloudNativePG is deployed using regular manifests written in YAML.

By following the instructions on this page you should be able to start a PostgreSQL cluster on your local Kubernetes installation and experiment with it.

Part 1 - Setup the local Kubernetes playground

The first part is about installing Minikube or Kind. Please spend some time reading about the systems and decide which one to proceed with. After setting up one of them, please proceed with part 2.

Minikube

Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a Virtual Machine (VM) on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop with it day-to-day. Normally, it is used in conjunction with VirtualBox.

You can find more information in the official Kubernetes documentation on how to install Minikube in your local personal environment. When you installed it, run the following command to create a minikube cluster:

minikube start

This will create the Kubernetes cluster, and you will be ready to use it. Verify that it works with the following command:

kubectl get nodes

You will see one node called minikube.

Kind

If you do not want to use a virtual machine hypervisor, then Kind is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container "nodes" (Kind stands for "Kubernetes IN Docker" indeed).

Install kind on your environment following the instructions in the Quickstart, then create a Kubernetes cluster with:

kind create cluster --name pg

Part 2 - Install CloudNativePG

Now that you have a Kubernetes installation up and running on your laptop, you can proceed with CloudNativePG installation.

Please refer to the "Installation" section and then proceed with the deployment of a PostgreSQL cluster.

Part 3 - Deploy a PostgreSQL cluster

As with any other deployment in Kubernetes, to deploy a PostgreSQL cluster you need to apply a configuration file that defines your desired Cluster.

The cluster-example.yaml sample file defines a simple Cluster using the default storage class to allocate disk space:

# Example of PostgreSQL cluster
apiVersion: postgresql.cnpg.io/v1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: cluster-example
spec:
  instances: 3

  # Example of rolling update strategy:
  # - unsupervised: automated update of the primary once all
  #                 replicas have been upgraded (default)
  # - supervised: requires manual supervision to perform
  #               the switchover of the primary
  primaryUpdateStrategy: unsupervised

  # Require 1Gi of space
  storage:
    size: 1Gi

In order to create the 3-node PostgreSQL cluster, you need to run the following command:

kubectl apply -f cluster-example.yaml

You can check that the pods are being created with the get pods command:

kubectl get pods

By default, the operator will install the latest available minor version of the latest major version of PostgreSQL when the operator was released. You can override this by setting the imageName key in the spec section of the Cluster definition. For example, to install PostgreSQL 13.6:

apiVersion: postgresql.cnpg.io/v1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
   # [...]
spec:
   # [...]
   imageName: ghcr.io/cloudnative-pg/postgresql:13.6
   #[...]