Adminer - database management web app

Adminer can be used to connect to a database server and select, update or delete data, show table structures, indexes, forgeign keys or triggers and much more. It is similar to phpMyAdmin in its intent and usage.

In this project it is running in a separate docker container that is not mandatory to run but brings advantages when debugging the chat bot application.

Setup

To start Adminer along with the project the docker-compose.yml file has to contain the following:

adminer:
    container_name: adminer_dbmanagement
    image: adminer
    ports:
      - "8081:8080"

If the database server's ports are opened using the expose keyword instead of ports, the Adminer container needs an additional link to the database server container. The Adminer container can be left out completely when deploying to the production server.

When the Adminer container is started along with the project, it should be hosted on http://localhost:8081. Entering this in a web browser opens the web interface asking for credentials. To connect to the PostgreSQL database choose PostgreSQL as database type. Database name, username and password are found in the docker-compose.yml file where they are defined as POSTGRES_DB, POSTGRES_USER and POSTGRES_PASSWORD. The database server is the PostgreSQL database docker container which can be referenced using the container name and its port.

See the following screenshot as an example:

Usage

Once logged in, the database schema can be seen. It should not be modified though, because it is generated by Hibernate and changes will be lost on the shutdown of the container. Clicking on a table name and selecting select data shows the currently persisted entities.

Please note that when debugging and going step by step through the application code, changes made to the entities might not be visible in Adminer directly. The reason for this is that Hibernate starts to send changes to the database when a session is commited which is not necessarily the case when an entity is updated.