Create a local network and setup a database container.
Maybe seed the database with some dummy data.
Ansible for production
I'm not going to run a database in a container in production. This is going to be a managed db on AWS or DO (maybe a local postgres server installed with ansible as well).
Environment management. Ansible uses the same python lib as compose. So creating networks and linking everything should not be an issue.
Ansible would be ideal as it can be used to configure the entire machine from scratch.