The postgis image provides a Docker container running Postgres 9 with PostGIS 2.1 installed. This image is based on the official postgres image and provides variants for each version of Postgres 9 supported by the base image (9.0-9.4).

On the version 9.1+ images, the PostGIS extension can be installed into your database in the standard way via psql:

CREATE EXTENSION postgis; CREATE EXTENSION postgis_topology;

If you are using 9.0 or would otherwise prefer to use the older template database mechanism for installing PostGIS, the image also provides a template_postgis template database with postgis.sql, topology.sql, and spatial_ref_sys.sql loaded.

In order to run a basic container capable of serving a PostGIS-enabled database, start a container as follows:

docker run --name some-postgis -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword -d mdillon/postgis 

For more detailed instructions about how to start and control your Postgres container, see the documentation for the postgres image here.

Once you have started a database container, you can then connect to the database as follows:

docker run -it --link some-postgis:postgres --rm postgres \ sh -c 'exec psql -h "$POSTGRES_PORT_5432_TCP_ADDR" -p "$POSTGRES_PORT_5432_TCP_PORT" -U postgres' 

Using the resulting psql shell, you can create a PostGIS-enabled database by using the CREATE EXTENSION mechanism (or by using template_postgis for Postgres 9.0):

CREATE EXTENSION postgis; CREATE EXTENSION postgis_topology;

See the PostGIS documentation for more details on your options for creating and using a spatially-enabled database.