When setting up self-hosted services, testing open-source projects, or copying quick commands from GitHub READMEs, documentation almost always gives you a docker run one-liner:

docker run -d \ --name postgres_db \ -p 5432:5432 \ -v pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data \ -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD = supersecret \ -e POSTGRES_USER = admin \ --restart unless-stopped \ postgres:16-alpine

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While great for testing, running containers via individual commands is difficult to maintain in production. You forget which flags you passed, configurations aren't tracked in version control, and restarting a machine requires hunting through your bash history.

The standard fix is writing a docker-compose.yml file.…