pg-harness
pg-harness is a REST service for conveniently creating temporary
PostgreSQL databases. It is intended for use from tests.
Usage
Once the service is set up and running (see below), you can do a HTTP POST to it to create a temporary database. For example,
$ curl -d '' http://localhost:8900
pg-harness-test:pg-harness-pass@db:5432/temp_ba36rk6r...
The response indicates that the temporary database
temp_ba36rk6r... has been created on the
database server db (port 5432) and made available to the user
pg-harness-test using the password pg-harness-pass.
The database will automatically be destroyed after a configurable
duration, though any temporary databases that have not been destroyed
when the service is stopped will stay around. All temporary databases
will be named temp_....
Usage (Haskell)
An easy-to-use client library for Haskell is included; see the Hackage entry for documentation.
Security Notice
Since pg-harness must be able to forcibly drop connections to the
temporary databases it creates, you'll need to set up a superuser
account on the database server. I would recommend using a separate
account from the normal database superuser, and I would also highly
recommend using a non-production PostgreSQL instance.
Furthermore, you should definitely NOT run this on any network
facing the public Internet since no attempt has been made to prevent
DoS attacks and the like. The pg-harness REST service is only meant
for development LANs which are firewalled off.
Installing the service
The recommended installation option is to use a Cabal sandbox for installation, for example
$ mkdir ~/opt/pg-harness
$ cabal sandbox init
$ cabal install pg-harness
When the installation is done, update the pg-harness.ini file to
suit your setup (see below).
You can now run pg-harness manually from
./.cabal-sandbox/bin/pg-harness, or you could configure it run as a
system service (e.g. via systemd, upstart or similar).
Database Setup
The user names in this section are just examples that'll minimize the
number of changes you'll need to do to the pg-harness.ini that's
shipped with pg-harness. You can change the user names here to
anything you like, just make sure the configuration file reflects any
changes you make.
To create the administrator user, use the command
$ createuser -d -E -i -l -P -s pg-harness
as the PostgreSQL superuser. Make sure you enter a password that is
not used for any other critical infrastructure since you'll need
to put the password in the pg-harness.ini configuration file.
To provide client programs with access to the temporary databases, you'll also need an unprivileged user. This user will only have access to the temporary databases that are created by the harness. To create the user, use the command
$ createuser -D -E -i -l -P -S pg-harness-test
Enter a password and put that password in the configuration file. Note
that only the user name is used during normal operation of the
pg-harness REST service, so any problems with the password will only
become apparent once your tests actually try to connect.
