Maybe you are not shutting Postgres down correctly? 'docker kill' is kill `kill -9`, it doesn't let the container shutdown gracefully. `docker stop` on the hand

Maybe you are not shutting Postgres down correctly? 'docker kill' is kill `kill -9`, it doesn't let the container shutdown gracefully. `docker stop` on the hand sends SIGTERM to the container and gives it a chance to shut down correctly. As for running Postgres as a background process of something else: I actually recommend this approach. I think running a single process inside a Docker container is a bad idea. By doing that, it does not start important system services such as syslog, and does not allow the container to really work correctly as a proper Unix system should. That is why we have created https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker, and we base all our Docker containers on that. The Github page that I linked to explains the problem in detail, explains why a lot of Docker containers are actually not working properly, explains how it solves that problem, and explains how you can use the solution.