Connecting to host database from a Docker container

Generally speaking, in a production environment, you don't want things like Nginx and your database running in Docker containers. You want those services running on the host and your application(s) in a container.

The tricky part here is that localhost in a container is the container's network, not the host's. So postgres://user@localhost:5432/somedatabase won't work.

Lots of solution online suggest using IP ranges or setting network=host so that Docker uses the host network.

The best solution is to use volumes. The great think about Linux is pretty much everything is a file. So if something has a port, it probably has a socket.

So then your docker-compose.yml file can just look like this:

services:
  web:
    image: organisation/image-name
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/postgresql/:/var/run/postgresql/

Then away you go. For a Django app, you just set HOST="/var/run/postgresql" in your settings file.