Docker | Postgres Database is uninitialized and superuser password is not specified

A year ago it were actually working fine, Does anyone have any idea, what's going wrong here inside my docker-compose file now.

Seems like you pulled the fresh image, where in the new image you should specify Postgres user password. You can look into Dockerhub, the image is update one month ago

postgress-11-alpine

  db:
    image: postgres:11-alpine
    restart: always
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: example

As the error message is self expalinatory

You must specify POSTGRES_PASSWORD to a non-empty value for the
        superuser. For example, "-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password" on "docker run".

or POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust use this which is not recommended.

You may also use "POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust" to allow all
 connections without a password. This is *not* recommended.

POSTGRES_PASSWORD

This environment variable is required for you to use the PostgreSQL image. It must not be empty or undefined. This environment variable sets the superuser password for PostgreSQL. The default superuser is defined by the POSTGRES_USER environment variable.

Environment Variables

@Adiii yes, you are nearly right, so I have to explicitly mentioned the environment also for the postgres image but with no db parent tag.

So here, I am explicitly mentioning the docker-compose.yaml config to help others for better understanding, also now I am using recent stable postgres image version 12-alpine, currently latest is postgres:12.3

version: '3'
services:
    postgres:
        image: 'postgres:12-alpine'
        environment:
            POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres_password
    redis:
        image: 'redis:latest'
    server:
        build:
            dockerfile: Dockerfile.dev
            context: ./server
        volumes:
            - /app/node_modules
            - ./server:/app
        environment:
            - REDIS_HOST=redis
            - REDIS_PORT=6379
            - PGUSER=postgres
            - PGHOST=postgres
            - PGDATABASE=postgres
            - PGPASSWORD=postgres_password
            - PGPORT=5432

and so after docker-compose up the creating and running logs were as following:

PS E:\docker\complex> docker-compose up
Creating network "complex_default" with the default driver
Creating complex_postgres_1 ... done
Creating complex_redis_1    ... done
Creating complex_server_1   ... done
Attaching to complex_redis_1, complex_postgres_1, complex_server_1
postgres_1  | The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
postgres_1  | This user must also own the server process.
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | The database cluster will be initialized with locale "en_US.utf8".
postgres_1  | The default database encoding has accordingly been set to "UTF8".
postgres_1  | The default text search configuration will be set to "english".
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | Data page checksums are disabled.
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | fixing permissions on existing directory /var/lib/postgresql/data ... ok
postgres_1  | creating subdirectories ... ok
postgres_1  | selecting dynamic shared memory implementation ... posix
postgres_1  | selecting default max_connections ... 100
postgres_1  | selecting default shared_buffers ... 128MB
postgres_1  | selecting default time zone ... UTC
redis_1     | 1:C 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.692 # oO0OoO0OoO0Oo Redis is starting oO0OoO0OoO0Oo
redis_1     | 1:C 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.692 # Redis version=6.0.6, bits=64, commit=00000000, modified=0, pid=1, just started
redis_1     | 1:C 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.692 # Warning: no config file specified, using the default config. In order to specify a config file use redis-server /path/to/redis.conf
postgres_1  | creating configuration files ... ok
redis_1     | 1:M 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.693 * Running mode=standalone, port=6379.
redis_1     | 1:M 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.693 # WARNING: The TCP backlog setting of 511 cannot be enforced because /proc/sys/net/core/somaxconn is set to the lower value of 128.
redis_1     | 1:M 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.694 # Server initialized
redis_1     | 1:M 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.694 # WARNING you have Transparent Huge Pages (THP) support enabled in your kernel. This will create latency and memory usage issues with Redis. To fix this issue run the command 'echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled' as root, and add it to your /etc/rc.local in order to retain the setting after a reboot. Redis must be restarted after THP is disabled.
redis_1     | 1:M 05 Aug 2020 14:24:48.694 * Ready to accept connections
postgres_1  | running bootstrap script ... ok
server_1    |
server_1    | > @ dev /app
server_1    | > nodemon
server_1    |
postgres_1  | performing post-bootstrap initialization ... sh: locale: not found
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:50.153 UTC [29] WARNING:  no usable system locales were found
server_1    | [nodemon] 2.0.4
server_1    | [nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
server_1    | [nodemon] watching path(s): *.*
server_1    | [nodemon] watching extensions: js,mjs,json
server_1    | [nodemon] starting `node index.js`
postgres_1  | ok
server_1    | Listening
postgres_1  | syncing data to disk ... ok
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | Success. You can now start the database server using:
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  |     pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgresql/data -l logfile start
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | initdb: warning: enabling "trust" authentication for local connections
postgres_1  | You can change this by editing pg_hba.conf or using the option -A, or
postgres_1  | --auth-local and --auth-host, the next time you run initdb.
postgres_1  | waiting for server to start....2020-08-05 14:24:51.634 UTC [34] LOG:  starting PostgreSQL 12.3 on x86_64-pc-linux-musl, compiled by gcc (Alpine 9.3.0) 9.3.0, 64-bit
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:51.700 UTC [34] LOG:  listening on Unix socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:51.981 UTC [35] LOG:  database system was shut down at 2020-08-05 14:24:50 UTC
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.040 UTC [34] LOG:  database system is ready to accept connections
postgres_1  |  done
postgres_1  | server started
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | /usr/local/bin/docker-entrypoint.sh: ignoring /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/*
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | waiting for server to shut down....2020-08-05 14:24:52.121 UTC [34] LOG:  received fast shutdown request

postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.186 UTC [34] LOG:  aborting any active transactions
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.188 UTC [34] LOG:  background worker "logical replication launcher" (PID 41) exited with exit code 1
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.188 UTC [36] LOG:  shutting down
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.669 UTC [34] LOG:  database system is shut down
postgres_1  |  done
postgres_1  | server stopped
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | PostgreSQL init process complete; ready for start up.
postgres_1  |
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.832 UTC [1] LOG:  starting PostgreSQL 12.3 on x86_64-pc-linux-musl, compiled by gcc (Alpine 9.3.0) 9.3.0, 64-bit
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.832 UTC [1] LOG:  listening on IPv4 address "0.0.0.0", port 5432
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.832 UTC [1] LOG:  listening on IPv6 address "::", port 5432
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:52.954 UTC [1] LOG:  listening on Unix socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:53.136 UTC [43] LOG:  database system was shut down at 2020-08-05 14:24:52 UTC
postgres_1  | 2020-08-05 14:24:53.194 UTC [1] LOG:  database system is ready to accept connections

Hope this would help manyone.

In my case there was an error about the POSTGRES_PASSWORD (in docker-compose.yml) and the DATABASE settings for PASSWORD in the project_level settings.py file.

After providing a password in docker-compose.yml

  db:   # For the PostgreSQL database
    image: postgres:11
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=example

It is necessary to provide the same password to enable access to the POSTGRES database between the two containers (in my case the web application and the database it depended on). In the project_level settings.py:

# Database
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/ref/settings/#databases

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
        'NAME': 'postgres',
        'USER': 'postgres',
        'PASSWORD': 'example',
        'HOST': 'db',
        'PORT': 5432
    }
}

Adding on ArifMustafa's answer, This worked for me.

  postgres:
    image:  'postgres:12-alpine'
    environment:
        POSTGRES_PASSWORD: mypassword
    expose:
      - 5432
    volumes: 
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgres/data/


volumes:
   postgres_data: