Our application looks good, as we can now create events and we have a frontend and backend automatically running when we start workspaces. However, our APIs won’t work yet, as they need to be configured to use a database. With Gitpod you can connect to externally hosted databases. However, for simplicity, in this tutorial we’re going to set up a database that runs in our workspace. To help installing our database we’re going to use Gitpod workspace iamges.

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Understanding workspace images

When no image is referenced in the .gitpod.yml workspaces use the workspace-full image by default, which comes with many commonly used utilities. If you want to override the workspace image you can reference a built Docker image.
.gitpod.yml
image: registry.hub.docker.com/your_username/image
Or, you can reference a Dockerfile in the repository.
.gitpod.yml
image:
    file: .gitpod.Dockerfile

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Installing Postgres

For our example we’ll use Postgres with the Gitpod PostgresQL workspace image. Copy the following line into your .gitpod.yml file:
.gitpod.yml
image: gitpod/workspace-postgres
The image will start postgres by default on port 5432. Let’s add a port configuration to define and ignore that port in our .gitpod.yml. Again, copy the following lines into your .gitpod.yml file:
.gitpod.yml
 - name: database
   port: 5432
   onOpen: ignore

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Database seeding

Finally, let’s automate the creation of our schema, and any necessary data seeding. For that, let’s add our init-db.sh script to our .gitpod.yml. Copy the following into the tasks block that we created earlier:
.gitpod.yml
 - name: create tables in db
   command: './init-db.sh'

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Next Steps

Configure environment variables →