$ docker run -e POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust --name postgres-test postgres:12 ******************************************************************************** WARNING: POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD has been set to "trust". This will allow anyone with access to the Postgres port to access your database without a password, even if POSTGRES_PASSWORD is set. See PostgreSQL documentation about "trust": https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/auth-trust.html In Docker's default configuration, this is effectively any other  container on the same system.   It is not recommended to use POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust. Replace  it with "-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password" instead to set a password in  "docker run". ******************************************************************************** initdb: error: password file "/dev/fd/63" is empty The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres". This user must also own the server process.  The database cluster will be initialized with locale "en_US.utf8". The default database encoding has accordingly been set to "UTF8". The default text search configuration will be set to "english".  Data page checksums are disabled.