Fix broken build, replace the unmaintained Sakila image, add Codespaces

[jvanbuel]

The repo does not build

docker compose build, the first command in the README, fails:

E: The repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian buster Release' does not have a Release file.

python:3.10-slim-buster is EOL and its apt repositories now return 404. The apt-get layer that fails installs no packages at all (--no-install-recommends with an empty package list), so this removes it rather than repairing it.

This matters more than the commit count suggests: dbt-docker draws 321 views over the last four months, roughly half of all traffic across the org's 40 public repos, and it is the only repo pulling meaningful cold discovery traffic. Everyone arriving has been landing on a broken first command.

Changes

File	Change
Dockerfile	python:3.12-slim; dbt-postgres 1.3.1 → 1.11.0 (dbt-core 1.12); dead apt layer and pytz pin removed
docker-compose.yml	frantiseks/postgres-sakila → official postgres:17 + Pagila; TCP healthcheck; obsolete version: key dropped
snapshots/int_customers_per_store_snapshot.sql	Renamed snapshot block, see below
packages.yml	dbt_utils 1.0.0 → 1.4.1
README.md	docker compose, corrected snapshot name, container names instead of docker ps lookup
db/	Pagila pagila-v3.1.0 vendored, 2.9 MB

Replacing the Sakila image

frantiseks/postgres-sakila is unmaintained and amd64-only, so every Apple Silicon user ran it under emulation. This switches to the official postgres:18 image preloaded with Pagila, the maintained Postgres port of Sakila.

Nothing is vendored. Dockerfile.postgres fetches the SQL at build time with ADD, so the repository keeps a URL instead of 13 MB of generated SQL, and changing dataset is a one-line edit to PAGILA_TAG. Files added from a URL are not world-readable by default, hence --chmod=644: the entrypoint reads them as the postgres user.

Pinned to pagila-v4.0.0, released 2026-07-28. The latest tag, v4.1.0, adds columns requiring the pgvector extension, which the official Postgres image does not carry. v4.0.0 needs no extensions at all, only PostgreSQL 18 for uuidv7().

Upstream health: 1099 stars, last push 5 days ago, 18 commits in 2026, 3 open issues, maintained since 2015 by Devrim Gunduz, who packages PostgreSQL for the Red Hat family. Single-maintainer, which is normal for a sample database.

A test that never ran

The snapshot block was named int_stock_balances_daily_grouped_by_day_snapshot while the file and _snapshots.yml both declared int_customers_per_store_snapshot. dbt warned that it could not find the node, so that snapshot's not_null test never executed. Renaming to match takes the suite from 8 data tests to 9. The wrong name appeared in the README example queries too.

Healthcheck

The healthcheck now runs over TCP. While the seed files load, the Postgres entrypoint runs a temporary server bound to the unix socket only, so a socket check reports healthy while TCP connections are still refused and dbt fails to connect on startup.

Codespaces

Adds .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and the badge, following the pattern already used by skill-boost-exposing-apis: docker-in-docker plus docker compose up -d --build on create, so the models are built by the time the editor opens. Postgres is forwarded on 5430. The three VS Code extension IDs were checked against the marketplace.

Verification

The postgres service builds from scratch and dbt build against it: PASS=15, WARN=0, ERROR=0. All six README example queries return sensible rows (51,061 payments, 599 seeded customers, 1,619 revenue dates).

One gap: the Docker image build itself is unverified. Docker Hub was unreachable from the machine this was prepared on, so python:3.12-slim never pulled. The dbt half was tested by running dbt-postgres 1.11 directly against the container, which covers the real risk in an 8-version jump. The deprecations expected around tests: and invalidate_hard_deletes turned out clean. Please confirm with one docker compose up --build before merging.