Altough the home directory of postgres user is /var/lib/postgresql, the owner is root.

[edib]

I am getting an error "could not save history to file "/var/lib/postgresql/.psql_history": Permission denied" in alpine version.

[yosifkit]

Ah, the /var/lib/postgresql/ directory is created by the installer in Debian. Looks like we need to chown it in the Dockerfile.

$ docker run -it --rm postgres:alpine bash
bash-4.3# ls -la $PGDATA
total 8
drwxrwxrwx    2 postgres postgres      4096 Apr 12 18:10 .
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root          4096 Apr  7 17:46 ..
bash-4.3# echo $PGDATA
/var/lib/postgresql/data
bash-4.3# exit
$ docker run -it --rm postgres bash
root@fd5dfbc8c064:/# ls -la $PGDATA
total 8
drwxrwxrwx 2 postgres postgres 4096 Apr 12 18:11 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 postgres postgres 4096 Apr  7 17:45 ..
root@fd5dfbc8c064:/# echo $PGDATA
/var/lib/postgresql/data