installation ./configure gmake su gmake install adduser postgres mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data su - postgres /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data >logfile 2>&1 & /usr/local/pgsql/bin/createdb test /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql test The long version is the rest of this In general, a modern Unix-compatible platform should be able to run PostgreSQL. The platforms that had received specific testing at the time of release are listed in below. In the doc subdirectory of the distribution there are several platform-specific FAQ documents you might wish to consult if you are having trouble. The following prerequisites exist for building PostgreSQL: make GNU make is required; other make programs will not work. GNU make is often installed under the name gmake; this document will always refer to it by that name. (On some systems GNU make is the default tool with the name make.) To test for GNU make enter gmake --version It is recommended to use version 3.76.1 or later. You need an ISO/ANSI C compiler. Recent versions of GCC are recommendable, but PostgreSQL is known to build with a wide variety of compilers from different vendors. gzip is needed to unpack the distribution in the first place. If you are reading this, you probably already got past that hurdle. readline The GNU Readline library (for comfortable line editing and command history retrieval) will be used by default. If you don't want to use it then you must specify the --without-readline option for configure. (On NetBSD, the libedit library is readline-compatible and is used if libreadline is not found.) flex bison yacc GNU Flex and Bison are needed to build from scratch, but they are not required when building from a released source package because pre-generated output files are included in released packages. You will need these programs only when building from a CVS tree or if you changed the actual scanner and parser definition files. If you need them, be sure to get Flex 2.5.4 or later and Bison 1.28 or later. Other yacc programs can sometimes be used, but doing so requires extra effort and is not recommended. Other lex programs will definitely not work. installation on Windows To build on Windows NT or Windows 2000 you need the Cygwin and cygipc packages. See the file doc/FAQ_MSWIN for details. If you need to get a GNU package, you can find it at your local GNU mirror site (see for a list) or at . Also check that you have sufficient disk space. You will need about 30 MB for the source tree during compilation and about 10 MB for the installation directory. An empty database cluster takes about 20 MB, databases take about five times the amount of space that a flat text file with the same data would take. If you are going to run the regression tests you will temporarily need an extra 20 MB. Use the df command to check for disk space. The PostgreSQL &version; sources can be obtained by anonymous FTP from . Use a mirror if possible. After you have obtained the file, unpack it: gunzip postgresql-&version;.tar.gz tar xf postgresql-&version;.tar This will create a directory postgresql-&version; under the current directory with the PostgreSQL sources. Change into that directory for the rest of the installation procedure. ]]> upgrading The internal data storage format changes with new releases of PostgreSQL. Therefore, if you are upgrading an existing installation that does not have a version number &majorversion;.x, you must back up and restore your data as shown here. These instructions assume that your existing installation is under the /usr/local/pgsql directory, and that the data area is in /usr/local/pgsql/data. Substitute your paths appropriately. Make sure that your database is not updated during or after the backup. This does not affect the integrity of the backup, but the changed data would of course not be included. If necessary, edit the permissions in the file /usr/local/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf (or equivalent) to disallow access from everyone except you. pg_dumpall To dump your database installation, type: pg_dumpall > outputfile If you need to preserve OIDs (such as when using them as foreign keys), then use the -o option when running pg_dumpall. pg_dumpall does not save large objects. Check Administrator's Guide]]> ]]> if you need to do this. Make sure that you use the pg_dumpall command from the version you are currently running. &version;'s pg_dumpall should not be used on older databases. If you are installing the new version at the same location as the old one then shut down the old server, at the latest before you install the new files: kill -INT `cat /usr/local/pgsql/data/postmaster.pid` Versions prior to 7.0 do not have this postmaster.pid file. If you are using such a version you must find out the process id of the server yourself, for example by typing ps ax | grep postmaster, and supply it to the kill command. On systems that have PostgreSQL started at boot time, there is probably a start-up file that will accomplish the same thing. For example, on a Red Hat Linux system one might find that /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql stop works. Another possibility is pg_ctl stop. If you are installing in the same place as the old version then it is also a good idea to move the old installation out of the way, in case you have trouble and need to revert to it. Use a command like this: mv /usr/local/pgsql /usr/local/pgsql.old After you have installed PostgreSQL &version;, create a new database directory and start the new server. Remember that you must execute these commands while logged in to the special database user account (which you already have if you are upgrading). /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data Finally, restore your data with /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -d template1 -f outputfile using the new psql. You can also install the new version in parallel with the old one to decrease the downtime. These topics are discussed at length in Administrator's Guide,]]> ,]]> which you are encouraged to read in any case. To start the build, type gmake (Remember to use GNU make.) The build may take anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour depending on your hardware. The last line displayed should be All of PostgreSQL is successfully made. Ready to install. regression test If you want to test the newly built server before you install it, you can run the regression tests at this point. The regression tests are a test suite to verify that PostgreSQL runs on your machine in the way the developers expected it to. Type gmake check (This won't work as root; do it as an unprivileged user.) It is possible that some tests fail, due to differences in error message wording or floating point results. src/test/regress/README and the Administrator's Guide contain]]> contains]]> detailed information about interpreting the test results. You can repeat this test at any later time by issuing the same command. If you are upgrading an existing system and are going to install the new files over the old ones, then you should have backed up your data and shut down the old server by now, as explained in above. To install PostgreSQL enter gmake install This will install files into the directories that were specified in . Make sure that you have appropriate permissions to write into that area. Normally you need to do this step as root. Alternatively, you could create the target directories in advance and arrange for appropriate permissions to be granted. You can use gmake install-strip instead of gmake install to strip the executable files and libraries as they are installed. This will save some space. If you built with debugging support, stripping will effectively remove the debugging support, so it should only be done if debugging is no longer needed. install-strip tries to do a reasonable job saving space, but it does not have perfect knowledge of how to strip every unneeded byte from an executable file, so if you want to save all the disk space you possibly can, you will have to do manual work. If you built the Perl or Python interfaces and you were not the root user when you executed the above command then that part of the installation probably failed. In that case you should become the root user and then do gmake -C src/interfaces/perl5 install gmake -C src/interfaces/python install If you do not have superuser access you are on your own: you can still take the required files and place them in other directories where Perl or Python can find them, but how to do that is left as an exercise. The standard installation provides only the header files needed for client application development. If you plan to do any server-side program development (such as custom functions or data types written in C), then you may want to install the entire PostgreSQL include tree into your target include directory. To do that, enter gmake install-all-headers This adds a megabyte or two to the installation footprint, and is only useful if you don't plan to keep the whole source tree around for reference. (If you do, you can just use the source's include directory when building server-side software.) If you want to install only the client applications and interface libraries, then you can use these commands: gmake -C src/bin install gmake -C src/include install gmake -C src/interfaces install gmake -C doc install To undo the installation use the command gmake uninstall. However, this will not remove any created directories. After the installation you can make room by removing the built files from the source tree with the gmake clean command. This will preserve the files made by the configure program, so that you can rebuild everything with gmake later on. To reset the source tree to the state in which it was distributed, use gmake distclean. If you are going to build for several platforms from the same source tree you must do this and re-configure for each build. If you perform a build and then discover that your configure options were wrong, or if you change anything that configure investigates (for example, you install GNU Readline), then it's a good idea to do gmake distclean before reconfiguring and rebuilding. Without this, your changes in configuration choices may not propagate everywhere they need to. shared libraries On some systems that have shared libraries (which most systems do) you need to tell your system how to find the newly installed shared libraries. The systems on which this is not necessary include BSD/OS, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX), and Solaris. The method to set the shared library search path varies between platforms, but the most widely usable method is to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH like so: In Bourne shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh) LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/lib export LD_LIBRARY_PATH or in csh or tcsh setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/pgsql/lib Replace /usr/local/pgsql/lib with whatever you set --libdir to in . You should put these commands into a shell start-up file such as /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile. Some good information about the caveats associated with this method can be found at . On some systems it might be preferable to set the environment variable LD_RUN_PATH before building. If in doubt, refer to the manual pages of your system (perhaps ld.so or rld). If you later on get a message like psql: error in loading shared libraries libpq.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory then this step was necessary. Simply take care of it then. ldconfig If you are on BSD/OS, Linux, or SunOS 4 and you have root access you can run /sbin/ldconfig /usr/local/pgsql/lib (or equivalent directory) after installation to enable the run-time linker to find the shared libraries faster. Refer to the manual page of ldconfig for more information. On FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD the command is /sbin/ldconfig -m /usr/local/pgsql/lib instead. Other systems are not known to have an equivalent command. PATH If you installed into /usr/local/pgsql or some other location that is not searched for programs by default, you need to add /usr/local/pgsql/bin (or whatever you set --bindir to in ) into your PATH. To do this, add the following to your shell start-up file, such as ~/.bash_profile (or /etc/profile, if you want it to affect every user): PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/bin:$PATH If you are using csh or tcsh, then use this command: set path = ( /usr/local/pgsql/bin $path ) MANPATH man pages To enable your system to find the man documentation, you need to add a line like the following to a shell start-up file: MANPATH=/usr/local/pgsql/man:$MANPATH The environment variables PGHOST and PGPORT specify to client applications the host and port of the database server, overriding the compiled-in defaults. If you are going to run client applications remotely then it is convenient if every user that plans to use the database sets PGHOST. This is not required, however: the settings can be communicated via command line options to most client programs. The following is a quick summary of how to get PostgreSQL up and running once installed. The Administrator's Guide contains more information. Create a user account for the PostgreSQL server. This is the user the server will run as. For production use you should create a separate, unprivileged account (postgres is commonly used). If you do not have root access or just want to play around, your own user account is enough, but running the server as root is a security risk and will not work. adduser postgres Create a database installation with the initdb command. To run initdb you must be logged in to your PostgreSQL server account. It will not work as root. root# mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data root# chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data root# su - postgres postgres$ /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data The -D option specifies the location where the data will be stored. You can use any path you want, it does not have to be under the installation directory. Just make sure that the server account can write to the directory (or create it, if it doesn't already exist) before starting initdb, as illustrated here. The previous step should have told you how to start up the database server. Do so now. The command should look something like /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data This will start the server in the foreground. To put the server in the background use something like nohup /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data \ </dev/null >>server.log 2>&1 </dev/null & To stop a server running in the background you can type kill `cat /usr/local/pgsql/data/postmaster.pid` In order to allow TCP/IP connections (rather than only Unix domain socket ones) you need to pass the -i option to postmaster. Create a database: createdb testdb Then enter psql testdb to connect to that database. At the prompt you can enter SQL commands and start experimenting. The PostgreSQL distribution contains a comprehensive documentation set, which you should read sometime. After installation, the documentation can be accessed by pointing your browser to /usr/local/pgsql/doc/html/index.html, unless you changed the installation directories. The Tutorial should be your first reading if you are completely new to SQL databases. If you are familiar with database concepts then you want to proceed with the Administrator's Guide, which contains information about how to set up the database server, database users, and authentication. Usually, you will want to modify your computer so that it will automatically start the database server whenever it boots. Some suggestions for this are in the Administrator's Guide. Run the regression tests against the installed server (using the sequential test method). If you didn't run the tests before installation, you should definitely do it now. This is also explained in the Administrator's Guide. ]]> PostgreSQL has been verified by the developer community to work on the platforms listed below. A supported platform generally means that PostgreSQL builds and installs according to these instructions and that the regression tests pass. If you are having problems with the installation on a supported platform, please write to pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org or pgsql-ports@postgresql.org, not to the people listed here. OS Processor Version Reported Remarks AIX RS6000 7.2 2001-12-19, Andreas Zeugswetter (ZeugswetterA@spardat.at), Tatsuo Ishii (t-ishii@sra.co.jp) see also doc/FAQ_AIX BeOS x86 7.2 2001-11-29, Cyril Velter (cyril.velter@libertysurf.fr) 5.0.4 BSD/OS x86 7.2 2001-11-27, Bruce Momjian (pgman@candle.pha.pa.us) 4.2 FreeBSD Alpha 7.2 2001-12-18, Chris Kings-Lynne (chriskl@familyhealth.com.au) FreeBSD x86 7.2 2001-11-14, Chris Kings-Lynne (chriskl@familyhealth.com.au) HP-UX PA-RISC 7.2 2001-11-29, Joseph Conway (Joseph.Conway@home.com), Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) 11.00 and 10.20; see also doc/FAQ_HPUX IRIX MIPS 7.2 2001-11-28, Luis Amigo (lamigo@atc.unican.es) 6.5.13, MIPSPro 7.30 Linux Alpha 7.2 2001-11-16, Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) 2.2.18; tested at SourceForge Linux armv4l 7.2 2001-12-10, Mark Knox (segfault@hardline.org) 2.2.x Linux MIPS 7.2 2001-11-15, Hisao Shibuya (shibuya@alpha.or.jp) 2.0.x; Cobalt Qube2 Linux PlayStation 2 7.2 2001-12-12, Permaine Cheung pcheung@redhat.com) #undef HAS_TEST_AND_SET, slock_t Linux PPC74xx 7.2 2001-11-16, Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) 2.2.18; Apple G3 Linux S/390 7.2 2001-12-12, Permaine Cheung pcheung@redhat.com) Linux Sparc 7.2 2001-11-28, Doug McNaught (doug@wireboard.com) 2.2.19 Linux x86 7.2 2001-11-15, Thomas Lockhart (lockhart@fourpalms.org) 2.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.4.x MacOS X PPC 7.2 2001-11-28, Gavin Sherry (swm@linuxworld.com.au) 10.1.x NetBSD Alpha 7.2 2001-11-20, Thomas Thai (tom@minnesota.com) 1.5W NetBSD arm32 7.1 2001-03-21, Patrick Welche (prlw1@cam.ac.uk) 1.5E NetBSD m68k 7.0 2000-04-10, Henry B. Hotz (hotz@jpl.nasa.gov) Mac 8xx NetBSD MIPS 7.2.1 2002-06-13, Warwick Hunter (whunter@agile.tv) 1.5.3 NetBSD PPC 7.2 2001-11-28, Bill Studenmund (wrstuden@netbsd.org) 1.5 NetBSD Sparc 7.2 2001-12-03, Matthew Green (mrg@eterna.com.au) 32- and 64-bit builds NetBSD VAX 7.1 2001-03-30, Tom I. Helbekkmo (tih@kpnQwest.no) 1.5 NetBSD x86 7.2 2001-11-28, Bill Studenmund (wrstuden@netbsd.org) 1.5 OpenBSD Sparc 7.2 2001-11-27, Brandon Palmer (bpalmer@crimelabs.net) 3.0 OpenBSD x86 7.2 2001-11-26, Brandon Palmer (bpalmer@crimelabs.net) 3.0 Open UNIX x86 7.2 2001-11-28, OU-8 Larry Rosenman (ler@lerctr.org), UW-7 Olivier Prenant (ohp@pyrenet.fr) see also doc/FAQ_SCO QNX 4 RTOS x86 7.2 2001-12-10, Bernd Tegge (tegge@repas-aeg.de) 4.25; see also doc/FAQ_QNX4 Solaris Sparc 7.2 2001-11-12, Andrew Sullivan (andrew@libertyrms.com) 2.6-8; see also doc/FAQ_Solaris Solaris x86 7.2 2001-11-28, Martin Renters (martin@datafax.com) 2.8; see also doc/FAQ_Solaris SunOS 4 Sparc 7.2 2001-12-04, Tatsuo Ishii (t-ishii@sra.co.jp) Tru64 UNIX Alpha 7.2 2001-11-26, Alessio Bragadini (alessio@albourne.com), Bernd Tegge (tegge@repas-aeg.de) 5.0; 4.0g with cc and gcc Windows x86 7.2 2001-12-13, Dave Page (dpage@vale-housing.co.uk), Jason Tishler (jason@tishler.net) with Cygwin; see doc/FAQ_MSWIN Windows x86 7.2 2001-12-10, Dave Page (dpage@vale-housing.co.uk) native is client-side only; ]]> The following platforms are either known not to work, or they used to work in a previous release and we did not receive explicit confirmation of a successful test with version &majorversion; at the time this list was compiled. We include these here to let you know that these platforms could be supported if given some attention. OS Processor Version Reported Remarks DG/UX 5.4R4.11 m88k 6.3 1998-03-01, Brian E Gallew (geek+@cmu.edu) no recent reports MkLinux DR1 PPC750 7.0 2001-04-03, Tatsuo Ishii (t-ishii@sra.co.jp) 7.1 needs OS update? NeXTSTEP x86 6.x 1998-03-01, David Wetzel (dave@turbocat.de) bit rot suspected QNX RTOS v6 x86 7.2 2001-11-20, Igor Kovalenko (Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com) patches available in archives, but too late for 7.2 SCO OpenServer 5 x86 6.5 1999-05-25, Andrew Merrill (andrew@compclass.com) &version; should work, but no reports; see also doc/FAQ_SCO System V R4 m88k 6.2.1 1998-03-01, Doug Winterburn (dlw@seavme.xroads.com) needs new TAS spinlock code System V R4 MIPS 6.4 1998-10-28, Frank Ridderbusch (ridderbusch.pad@sni.de) no recent reports Ultrix MIPS 7.1 2001-03-26 TAS spinlock code not detected Ultrix VAX 6.x 1998-03-01