Postgres with clickhousectl

clickhousectl manages Postgres in two environments:

• Local — named, Docker-backed Postgres instances on the user's machine, for development.
• Cloud — managed Postgres services in ClickHouse Cloud (beta), for production: HA, read replicas, point-in-time restore.

This file routes to the right reference. The step-by-step workflows live in ref/local.md and ref/cloud.md — read the one that matches the user's situation before running commands.

Which reference to use

The user wants to...	Read
Develop or prototype locally, run tests/CI against Postgres, no cloud account needed	ref/local.md
Go to production, host a managed Postgres, or use ClickHouse Cloud explicitly	ref/cloud.md
Operate an existing cloud service (passwords, TLS, config, replicas, failover, restore)	ref/cloud.md
Develop locally now, ship to production later	Start with ref/local.md; it points to ref/cloud.md when it's time to go to prod

If it's genuinely ambiguous (e.g. "set up Postgres for my app"), default to local for development tasks and ask before creating anything in the cloud — cloud services cost money.

Prerequisites (both workflows)

Check that clickhousectl is installed:

which clickhousectl

If not found, install it:

curl -fsSL https://clickhouse.com/cli | sh

This installs to ~/.local/bin/clickhousectl (with a chctl alias). If the command is still not found, suggest export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" or a new terminal.

All commands accept --json for machine-readable output. Exit codes follow gh conventions: 0 success, 1 error, 2 cancelled, 4 auth required.

Related

• To replicate Postgres data into ClickHouse for analytics, see ClickPipes (clickhousectl cloud clickpipe --help).
• For ClickHouse itself (local development or ClickHouse Cloud services), use the infra-clickhouse skill.