QATrack 4.0 Docker: .env question?

[M. D. Lund]

Hello everyone.

First of all a huge shoutout to the QATrack team for the amazing work put into this project. Thanks a lot!

I have installed QATrack+ 4.0 in Docker on a Ubuntu 24.04 server. I initially installed using the default .env file, and that worked just fine. 

I then removed all containers and images, edited the .env file and changed the postgres user and password to something more secure and build the image again. When I run docker-compose up I get an error about postgres authentication

postgres-1  | 2026-09-23 07:53:36.965 UTC [45] FATAL:  password authentication failed for user "pguser"
postgres-1  | 2026-09-23 07:53:36.965 UTC [45] DETAIL:  Role "pguser" does not exist.
...

django-1    | django.db.utils.OperationalError: connection failed: connection to server at "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx", port 5432 failed: FATAL:  password authentication failed for user "pguser"
Container qatrackplus-django-1 Error dependency django failed to start
dependency failed to start: container qatrackplus-django-1 is unhealthy

Should I have kept away from changing the credenaitls in .env or am I doing something wrong here? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

I would also just mention that the instructions in https://docs.qatrackplus.com/en/releases-4.0/install/docker.html differ from the instructions in the README.md file in deploy/docker.

Kind regards,
Mikkel

[Nathan Smela]

Hi Mikkel,

Thanks for letting us know, the install doc appears stale and the README looks to be more recent. We can address that.

Removing the containers and images could miss removing the data, espetially a named volume  it appears the data for the original Postgres database survived. You need an empty data directory.

• to find all volumes: 'docker volume ls'
• to stop, use 'docker compose down'
• to remove the volume, use 'docker volume rm qatrackplus_postgres-volume'

Please let us know if that works.

Nathan