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↬ Who Needs a Database GUI? Docker Has a Terminal14 Aug 2026

We’ve all clicked our way through a database GUI (e.g: pgAdmin) a thousand times. But what if you could just talk to your database directly from the terminal, and Docker makes it surprisingly easy?

I've been working for almost 4 years now on software systems, and to be honest I don't remember when was the last time I touched a database GUI. I've been using docker terminal since I got the hang of it, and it's way faster for me to query my database and basically do everything.

In this blog post, I'll be using PostgreSQL as the database, but you can use any database you like, even redis, as long as it has an image on Docker Hub and a CLI tool.

Docker terminal

We start by running our database docker image, as I mentioned before, it's Postgres.

docker run --name mydb_container \
-e POSTGRES_DB=mydb \
-e POSTGRES_USER=root \
-e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=123 \
-p 5432:5432 \
-d postgres:18

This should start a Postgres v18 container, to access it you just have to run

docker exec -it mydb_container bash
Note

The -it flag make the session interactive, so you can actually interact with the shell.

Running queries

We are in. the beauty of this, is that you are not restricted to this database only, you can talk to a remote database, if you have the Postgres URL you can access it, because the container already ships with psql the Postgres command line interface. Most of the docker images of the databases already ship with their respective CLI tools, like mysql, mongosh, even redis-cli.

Now that we're in, you can run

psql -U root mydb

This if you want to access this local database you just ran. you can also do

psql postgres://root:123@localhost:5432/mydb

the URL here can be an RDS database URL, it doesn't matter.

once you run that, you are connected to the database and you can run SQL queries. to view the list of tables in the database you can do

\dt

The result will look like this:

              List of relations
 Schema |        Name        | Type  | Owner 
--------+--------------------+-------+-------
 public | blogs              | table | root
 public | users              | table | root

You can also view table details with

\d blogs

it will display all the details about the table, like column names, types, relationships, indexes, default value, ect. like this:

                                   Table "public.blogs"
    Column     |              Type              | Collation | Nullable |      Default      
---------------+--------------------------------+-----------+----------+-------------------
 id            | text                           |           | not null | 
 type          | "BlogType"                     |           | not null | 
 images        | jsonb[]                        |           |          | ARRAY[]::jsonb[]
 thumbnail     | text                           |           |          | 
 title         | text                           |           |          | 
 subtitle      | text                           |           |          | 
 status        | "BlogStatus"                   |           | not null | 
 content       | text                           |           |          | 
 showcase_url  | text                           |           |          | 
 tags          | text[]                         |           |          | ARRAY[]::text[]
 languages     | text[]                         |           |          | ARRAY[]::text[]
 created_at    | timestamp(3) without time zone |           | not null | CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
 updated_at    | timestamp(3) without time zone |           |          | 
 content_lang  | jsonb                          |           |          | 
 subtitle_lang | jsonb                          |           |          | 
 tags_lang     | jsonb                          |           |          | 
 title_lang    | jsonb                          |           |          | 
 slug          | text                           |           |          | 
Indexes:
    "blogs_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
    "blogs_slug_key" UNIQUE, btree (slug)

If a table has 100 columns, the screen might become unreadable you can fix that by running:

\x on

This should enable "Expanded display", so results will look like this

\dt
 
List of relations
-[ RECORD 1 ]--------------
Schema | public
Name   | blogs
Type   | table
Owner  | root
-[ RECORD 2 ]--------------
Schema | public
Name   | users
Type   | table
Owner  | root

After you ran a lot of commands, you need to clear the screen, you can run:

\! clear

At this point your mission is to learn more about the database CLI for example psql, it's really easy, you won't need more than what I've mentioned above, to view tables and format results.

I almost forgot one thing, is that you can do a single command to run a query like this

docker exec -it mydb_container psql postgres://root:123@localhost:5432/mydb -c "SELECT * FROM users;"

Finally

And that's pretty much it. Once you get comfortable with the database CLI, you can do most of the things you'd normally use a GUI for, directly from your terminal. It's simple, fast, and once you get used to it, you might not miss the GUI at all.

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