pgtemp is a Rust library and cli tool that allows you to easily create temporary PostgreSQL servers for testing without using Docker.

The pgtemp Rust library allows you to spawn a PostgreSQL server in a temporary directory and get back a full connection URI with the host, port, username, and password.

The pgtemp cli tool allows you to even more simply make temporary connections, and works with any language: Run pgtemp and then use its connection URI when connecting to the database in your tests. pgtemp will then spawn a new postgresql process for each connection it receives and transparently proxy everything over that connection to the temporary database. Note that this means when you make multiple connections in a single test, changes made in one connection will not be visible in the other connections, unless you are using pgtemp's --single mode.

pgtemp supports loading (and dumping, in the library) the database to/from dumpfiles via pg_dump.

You must install both the postgresql client and server packages. On Debian/Ubuntu, they are postgresql postgresql-client, on Fedora they are postgresql postgresql-server, and on Arch Linux they are postgresql postgresql-libs. Note also that Debian/Ubuntu install the standard postgres binaries into their own directory, so you must add them to your path. For an Ubuntu GitHub Actions runner, it looks like:

steps:
  - name: Install postgres
    run: sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client
  - name: Update path
    run: find /usr/lib/postgresql/ -type d -name "bin" >> $GITHUB_PATH

To install the CLI tool, you must install it with the --features cli or --all-features options

cargo install pgtemp --features cli

pgtemp is a fairly simple program and there are other existing libraries like testing.postgresql for Python and pgtest for Go that all work the same way:

• Do some setup, like creating temporary directories and copy files
• Run the initdb program
• Start the postgres server
• Wait until postgres has started

The novel idea (as far as I'm aware, although I also only found out about the above python/go libraries after coming up with the initial library idea) in pgtemp is the CLI/daemon which automatically provides connections to new temporary databases upon each connection.

$ cargo install --all-features pgtemp
# username, password, port, and database name are all configurable based on the provided connection URI
$ pgtemp postgresql://localhost:6543/mytestdb 
starting pgtemp server at postgresql://postgres:password@localhost:6543/mytestdb
$ psql postgresql://postgres:password@localhost:6543/mytestdb
psql (16.1)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=#

See examples/ directory for examples:

• A python example with sqlalchemy and alembic, demonstrating usage with the pgtemp cli's normal and single modes

use pgtemp::PgTempDB;
use sqlx::postgres::PgConnection;
use sqlx::prelude::*;

#[tokio::test]
fn cool_db_test() {
    let db = PgTempDB::async_new().await;
    let mut conn = sqlx::postgres::PgConnection::connect(&db.connection_uri())
        .await
        .expect("failed to connect to temp db");

    // ... do the rest of your test

    // db is shut down and files cleaned up upon drop at the end of the test
}

Examples:

• A simple diesel example with axum
• A more complicated "task queue" example using triggers and LISTEN/NOTIFY with sqlx and axum

See the tests/ directory for complete library usage.