Today, I released a small library called postgrestest. It spins up an ephemeral PostgreSQL database in Go. I’ve found it quite useful for writing tests that use PostgreSQL while keeping the test hermetic and reasonably fast. In my benchmarks, starting a server takes roughly 650 milliseconds and creating a database takes roughly 20 milliseconds — a 70% improvement and 90% improvement, respectively, over a postgres Docker container in the default configuration.

You can install it with:

go get zombiezen.com/go/postgrestest