Ok, after some search, it seems this is a problem with minikube/kubernetes itself.
Setting a node port is usually just ignored and big-brother kubernetes decide a random port for you, and it seems there is no clear way to undo this.

Any way I ended up doing a simple python script that runs minikube service list and extract the generated url/IP's for the published services into a properties file, but that was more tailored to my project.

anyway it will be nice if this can be handled by acorn somehow, as too much time was wasted trying to understand all these kubernetes magic just to run a local dev environment.

Right on. Thanks for opening the issue. There are definitely somethings we can do to improve this.

Publishing a port makes it accessible outside of the cluster. Is that what you want to accomplish?

Seems to me that you might want the db port to only be accessible inside the cluster (by keycloak) and keycloak to be accessible as an http service. Assuming that's the case, you should do the following:

1. Change ports: publish: "5432/tcp" to just ports: "5432/tcp"
2. Remove -p mydb.com:db:5432 from your run command entirely
3. Change ports: publish: "8080/tcp" to ports: publish: "8080/http"
4. I was going to tell you to also drop -p keycloak:8080, but I can't tell you what to do here definitively until I understand if you are trying to make keycloak accessible outside the cluster or only within the cluster

Publishing a port makes it accessible outside of the cluster. Is that what you want to accomplish?

Seems to me that you might want the db port to only be accessible inside the cluster (by keycloak) and keycloak to be accessible as an http service. Assuming that's the case, you should do the following:

1. Change ports: publish: "5432/tcp" to just ports: "5432/tcp"
2. Remove -p mydb.com:db:5432 from your run command entirely
3. Change ports: publish: "8080/tcp" to ports: publish: "8080/http"
4. I was going to tell you to also drop -p keycloak:8080, but I can't tell you what to do here definitively until I understand if you are trying to make keycloak accessible outside the cluster or only within the cluster

Actually this script is for running a local development environment on my machine - and other dev's machines- .
In this case I need all the services to be published on local host or the cluster machine with fixed ports, so the service we are working on can access them,
as it will run in debug mode for example on the developer machine directly not the cluster.

Having everything exposed is also needed so we can easily debug, we need to access the DB using DB tools to have better look.

ok, makes sense.

We provide a little guidance here on how to get minikube setup: https://docs.acorn.io/installation/installing#local-development-clusters. Key takeaways are to install the ingress add-on and run minikube tunnel.

I am assuming your set up is minikube using the docker driver. Correct me if I'm wrong.

After following those install instructions for minikube, I did a quick test of a modified version of your acornfile. I couldn't run your keycloak image, so here's the modified version I ran:

containers: {
    db: {
        image: "docker.io/library/postgres:12.1"
        env: {
            "POSTGRES_USER": "postgres"
            "POSTGRES_PASSWORD": "postgres"
            "PGDATA": "/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata"
        }
        ports: publish: "5432/tcp"
        dirs: {
            "/var/lib/postgresql/data": "volume://pgdata"
        }
    }
    app: {
        image: "nginx"
        ports: "80/http"
        scale: 1
        files: {
        // Simple index.html file
            "/usr/share/nginx/html/index.html": "<h1>test</h1>"
        }
    }
}

volumes: {
    "pgdata": {
        accessModes: "readWriteOnce"
     }
 }

Image build command:

acorn build -t test .

Run command:

acorn run -P test

That -P publishes all defined ports

Output of acorn ps:

patient-glitter   test      2         2            10m ago   http://app.patient-glitter.local.on-acorn.io => app:80, tcp://127.0.0.1:5432 => db:5432   OK

One limitation of this: only one app can consume port 5432, so if that port was already used by some other process or if you launched a second instance of the acorn, it would just hang in "pending" indefinitely.

After all that, I was able to connect to postgres:

$ psql --host 127.0.0.1 --port 5432 --user postgres
Password for user postgres:
psql (14.5, server 12.1 (Debian 12.1-1.pgdg100+1))
Type "help" for help.

postgres=#

One final note: my "app" service is on hostname rather than an IP because I defined it as "80/http" rather than "80/tcp". This gives us more flexibility in exposing it. If your keycloak service is indeed htttp, consider switching it from "8080/tcp" to "8080/http".

FWIW, minikube, IMO, is not the easiest desktop k8s distribution to use. If you aren't married to it, try out Docker Desktop or Rancher Desktop. Docker Desktop does run into some licensing issues (not free once you're over a certain size, I think) so keep that in mind.

Going to convert this to a discussion