Simon Willison’s Weblog

Per-project PostgreSQL (via) Jamey Sharp describes an ingenious way of setting up PostgreSQL instances for each of your local development project, without depending on an always-running shared localhost database server. The trick is a shell script which creates a PGDATA folder in the current folder and then instantiates a PostgreSQL server in --single single user mode which listens on a Unix domain socket in that folder, instead of listening on the network. Jamey then uses direnv to automatically configure that PostgreSQL, initializing the DB if necessary, for each of his project folders.