<p>I'm just adding the containers part of the spec. Everything is otherwise set up and working fine and values are hardcoded here. This is a simple Postgres pod that is part of a single replica deployment with its own PVC to persist state. But the problem is having nothing to do with my pod/deployment setup.</p>
<pre><code>containers:
    - name: postgres-container
      image: postgres
      imagePullPolicy: Always
      volumeMounts:
        - name: postgres-internal-volume
          mountPath: /var/lib/postgresql/data
          subPath: postgres
      envFrom:
        - configMapRef:
            name: postgres-internal-cnf
      ports:
        - containerPort: 5432
      command: ['psql']
      args: [-U postgres -tc &quot;SELECT 1 FROM pg_database WHERE datname = 'dominion'&quot; | grep -q 1 || psql -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres -c &quot;CREATE DATABASE dominion&quot;]
</code></pre>
<p>This command will create a database if it does not already exist. If I create the deployment and exec into the pod and run this command everything works fine. If I however run it here the pod fails to spin up and I get this error:</p>
<p>psql: error: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket &quot;/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432&quot;?</p>
<p>I was under the impression that this error comes from the default connection values being incorrect, but here I am hardcoding the localhost and the port number.</p>

Happy Machine
<p>With your pod spec, you've replaced the default command -- which starts up the postgres server -- with your own command, so the server never starts. The proper way to perform initialization tasks with the official Postgres image is <a href="https://github.com/docker-library/docs/blob/master/postgres/README.md#initialization-scripts" rel="nofollow noreferrer">in the documentation</a>.</p>
<p>You want to move your initialization commands into a ConfigMap, and then mount the scripts into <code>/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d</code> as described in those docs.</p>
<p>The docs have more details, but here's a short example. We want to run
<code>CREATE DATABASE dominion</code> when the postgres server starts (and only
if it is starting with an empty data directory). We can define a
simple SQL script in a <code>ConfigMap</code>:</p>
<pre><code>apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: postgres-init-scripts
data:
  create-dominion-db.sql: |
    CREATE DATABASE dominion
</code></pre>
<p>And then mount that script into the appropriate location in the pod
spec:</p>
<pre><code>volumes:
  - name: postgres-init-scripts
    configMap:
      name: postgres-init-scripts
containers:
  - name: postgres-container
    image: postgres
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    volumeMounts:
      - name: postgres-internal-volume
        mountPath: /var/lib/postgresql/data
        subPath: postgres
      - name: postgres-init-scripts
        mountPath:
        /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/create-dominion-db.sql
        subPath: create-dominion-db.sql
    envFrom:
      - configMapRef:
          name: postgres-internal-cnf
    ports:
      - containerPort: 5432
</code></pre>
