Docker: A Dockerfile to Fix the “Call to undefined function pg_connect()” Error when Using PHP with Postgres

When integrating a PHP application connecting to a PostgreSQL database, both services running as Docker containers using the official PHP and Postgre images, you might encounter (as I have) an error that looks something like this:

    Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function pg_connect() in ...

It’s actually a simple error, which means that there’s something wrong with the connection between the app and the PostgreSQL database, but when I first stumbled on it I had a hard time finding out what I needed to do to fix it. There was definitely something missing from the Docker setup, but I did not know what it was until I sought help from a teammate.

Apparently the official PHP docker image does not contain the PDO and PGSQL drivers necessary for the successful connection. Silly me for assuming it does.

The fix is simple. We have to create a Dockerfile that updates our PHP image with the required drivers, which contains the following code:

FROM php:7.1-fpm

RUN apt-get update

# Install PDO and PGSQL Drivers
RUN apt-get install -y libpq-dev \
  && docker-php-ext-configure pgsql -with-pgsql=/usr/local/pgsql \
  && docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_pgsql pgsql

Easy peasy. And to run this Dockerfile from a docker-compose.yml file, we’ll need the build, context, and dockerfile commands, replacing the single image command that does not use a Dockerfile:

version: '3'
services:
  php:
    build:
      context: ./directory/of/Dockerfile
      dockerfile: ./Dockerfile
    # All your other settings follow ...

And that should be all that you need to do! 🙂