A question about water-cawl-docker-db-1 and utc config

[cauduan]

I would like to ask two additional questions:

1. The water-cawl-docker-db-1 container keeps reporting errors with the following content: FATAL: role "root" does not exist. Then the water-cawl-docker-celery-beat-1 container also stops running, with the log content being: django.db.utils.OperationalError: connection to server at "db" (172.21.0.3), port 5432 failed: No route to host
   Is the server running on that host and accepting TCP/IP connections?
2. How to configure the time zone of Docker Compose? The time difference between the container and the server is 8 hours. Can you configure it i

[amirasaran]

Hey @cauduan,
Thanks for opening the discussion!

For the database error (FATAL: role "root" does not exist), it usually means that the PostgreSQL container is expecting a specific database user to be created on startup, but that user hasn’t been defined in your Docker environment variables (like POSTGRES_USER). Make sure your docker-compose.yml or .env file includes the correct user and password settings for the database, and that the Django app is configured to use them.

The OperationalError and "No route to host" log from the Celery Beat container likely means it can’t connect to the database—either because the database container isn't running properly, or the network configuration between the services is misconfigured. Once the DB issue is fixed, this should resolve itself.

For the time zone difference:
You can configure the container time zone by adding an environment variable or mounting the host's timezone settings. Example for docker-compose.yml:

environment:  
  - TZ=Asia/Shanghai  # Or your desired timezone

Or mount the timezone files:

volumes:  
  - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro  
  - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

To help you better, could you share your docker-compose.yml, .env file (remove sensitive data), and the full logs you’re seeing?

Let’s troubleshoot it together!