Select a recent version of guix (note the leading dot)

. ~/opt/guix-pull/etc/profile

Install postgres (here we opt for v14) with

guix packages -A postgres
mkdir -p ~/data/pgdata
cd ~/data
guix shell -C -N postgresql@14.4 glibc-locales binutils coreutils which \
  --share=$HOME/data/pgdata --share=/var/run/postgresql

To share `/var/run` make sure your user id is member of the postgres group.

Inside the shell

mkdir -p /var/run/postgresql
initdb -k -D pgdata/14
pg_ctl -D pgdata/14 -l logfile start
createdb test
psql test

and you should be able to work with everything. Note the user is the same as the user that runs the container.

Test then network interface with

telnet localhost 5432

To run a container in the background you may want to use screen and/or tmux.

To have the postgres client outside the container install it with

. ~/opt/guix-pull/etc/profile
guix package -i postgresql@14.4 -p ~/opt/postgresql14

Now you can add this

. ~/opt/postgresql14/etc/profile
psql test
\dt
etc etc

• https://fluca1978.github.io/2021/09/30/GNU_GUIX_PostgreSQL.html
• https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/A-Database-Container.html