installation This describes the installation of PostgreSQL using the source code distribution. (If you are installing a pre-packaged distribution, such as an RPM or Debian package, ignore this and read the packager's instructions instead.) ./configure make su make 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/postgres -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 software packages are required for building PostgreSQL: make GNU make version 3.80 or newer is required; other make programs or older GNU make versions will not work. (GNU make is sometimes installed under the name gmake.) To test for GNU make enter: make --version You need an ISO/ANSI C compiler (at least C89-compliant). Recent versions of GCC are recommended, but PostgreSQL is known to build using a wide variety of compilers from different vendors. tar is required to unpack the source distribution, in addition to either gzip or bzip2. readline libedit The GNU Readline library is used by default. It allows psql (the PostgreSQL command line SQL interpreter) to remember each command you type, and allows you to use arrow keys to recall and edit previous commands. This is very helpful and is strongly recommended. If you don't want to use it then you must specify the --without-readline option to configure. As an alternative, you can often use the BSD-licensed libedit library, originally developed on NetBSD. The libedit library is GNU Readline-compatible and is used if libreadline is not found, or if --with-libedit-preferred is used as an option to configure. If you are using a package-based Linux distribution, be aware that you need both the readline and readline-devel packages, if those are separate in your distribution. zlib The zlib compression library is used by default. If you don't want to use it then you must specify the --without-zlib option to configure. Using this option disables support for compressed archives in pg_dump and pg_restore. The following packages are optional. They are not required in the default configuration, but they are needed when certain build options are enabled, as explained below: To build the server programming language PL/Perl you need a full Perl installation, including the libperl library and the header files. Since PL/Perl will be a shared library, the libperl libperl library must be a shared library also on most platforms. This appears to be the default in recent Perl versions, but it was not in earlier versions, and in any case it is the choice of whomever installed Perl at your site. configure will fail if building PL/Perl is selected but it cannot find a shared libperl. In that case, you will have to rebuild and install Perl manually to be able to build PL/Perl. During the configuration process for Perl, request a shared library. If you intend to make more than incidental use of PL/Perl, you should ensure that the Perl installation was built with the usemultiplicity option enabled (perl -V will show whether this is the case). To build the PL/Python server programming language, you need a Python installation with the header files and the distutils module. The minimum required version is Python 2.4. Python 3 is supported if it's version 3.1 or later; but see PL/Python documentation]]> ]]> when using Python 3. Since PL/Python will be a shared library, the libpython libpython library must be a shared library also on most platforms. This is not the case in a default Python installation built from source, but a shared library is available in many operating system distributions. configure will fail if building PL/Python is selected but it cannot find a shared libpython. That might mean that you either have to install additional packages or rebuild (part of) your Python installation to provide this shared library. When building from source, run Python's configure with the --enable-shared flag. To build the PL/Tcl procedural language, you of course need a Tcl installation. The minimum required version is Tcl 8.4. To enable Native Language Support (NLS), that is, the ability to display a program's messages in a language other than English, you need an implementation of the Gettext API. Some operating systems have this built-in (e.g., Linux, NetBSD, Solaris), for other systems you can download an add-on package from . If you are using the Gettext implementation in the GNU C library then you will additionally need the GNU Gettext package for some utility programs. For any of the other implementations you will not need it. You need OpenSSL, if you want to support encrypted client connections. The minimum required version is 0.9.8. You need Kerberos, OpenLDAP, and/or PAM, if you want to support authentication using those services. To build the PostgreSQL documentation, there is a separate set of requirements; see .]]> If you are building from a Git tree instead of using a released source package, or if you want to do server development, you also need the following packages: flex lex bison yacc GNU Flex and Bison are needed to build from a Git checkout, or if you changed the actual scanner and parser definition files. If you need them, be sure to get Flex 2.5.31 or later and Bison 1.875 or later. Other lex and yacc programs cannot be used. perl Perl 5.8 or later is needed to build from a Git checkout, or if you changed the input files for any of the build steps that use Perl scripts. If building on Windows you will need Perl in any case. Perl is also required to run some test suites. 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 100 MB for the source tree during compilation and about 20 MB for the installation directory. An empty database cluster takes about 35 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 up to an extra 150 MB. Use the df command to check free disk space. The PostgreSQL &version; sources can be obtained from the download section of our website: . You should get a file named postgresql-&version;.tar.gz or postgresql-&version;.tar.bz2. After you have obtained the file, unpack it: gunzip postgresql-&version;.tar.gz tar xf postgresql-&version;.tar (Use bunzip2 instead of gunzip if you have the .bz2 file.) 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. You can also get the source directly from the version control repository, see . ]]> configure The first step of the installation procedure is to configure the source tree for your system and choose the options you would like. This is done by running the configure script. For a default installation simply enter: ./configure This script will run a number of tests to determine values for various system dependent variables and detect any quirks of your operating system, and finally will create several files in the build tree to record what it found. You can also run configure in a directory outside the source tree, if you want to keep the build directory separate. This procedure is also called a VPATHVPATH build. Here's how: mkdir build_dir cd build_dir /path/to/source/tree/configure [options go here] make The default configuration will build the server and utilities, as well as all client applications and interfaces that require only a C compiler. All files will be installed under /usr/local/pgsql by default. You can customize the build and installation process by supplying one or more of the following command line options to configure: --prefix=PREFIX Install all files under the directory PREFIX instead of /usr/local/pgsql. The actual files will be installed into various subdirectories; no files will ever be installed directly into the PREFIX directory. If you have special needs, you can also customize the individual subdirectories with the following options. However, if you leave these with their defaults, the installation will be relocatable, meaning you can move the directory after installation. (The man and doc locations are not affected by this.) For relocatable installs, you might want to use configure's --disable-rpath option. Also, you will need to tell the operating system how to find the shared libraries. --exec-prefix=EXEC-PREFIX You can install architecture-dependent files under a different prefix, EXEC-PREFIX, than what PREFIX was set to. This can be useful to share architecture-independent files between hosts. If you omit this, then EXEC-PREFIX is set equal to PREFIX and both architecture-dependent and independent files will be installed under the same tree, which is probably what you want. --bindir=DIRECTORY Specifies the directory for executable programs. The default is EXEC-PREFIX/bin, which normally means /usr/local/pgsql/bin. --sysconfdir=DIRECTORY Sets the directory for various configuration files, PREFIX/etc by default. --libdir=DIRECTORY Sets the location to install libraries and dynamically loadable modules. The default is EXEC-PREFIX/lib. --includedir=DIRECTORY Sets the directory for installing C and C++ header files. The default is PREFIX/include. --datarootdir=DIRECTORY Sets the root directory for various types of read-only data files. This only sets the default for some of the following options. The default is PREFIX/share. --datadir=DIRECTORY Sets the directory for read-only data files used by the installed programs. The default is DATAROOTDIR. Note that this has nothing to do with where your database files will be placed. --localedir=DIRECTORY Sets the directory for installing locale data, in particular message translation catalog files. The default is DATAROOTDIR/locale. --mandir=DIRECTORY The man pages that come with PostgreSQL will be installed under this directory, in their respective manx subdirectories. The default is DATAROOTDIR/man. --docdir=DIRECTORY Sets the root directory for installing documentation files, except man pages. This only sets the default for the following options. The default value for this option is DATAROOTDIR/doc/postgresql. --htmldir=DIRECTORY The HTML-formatted documentation for PostgreSQL will be installed under this directory. The default is DATAROOTDIR. Care has been taken to make it possible to install PostgreSQL into shared installation locations (such as /usr/local/include) without interfering with the namespace of the rest of the system. First, the string /postgresql is automatically appended to datadir, sysconfdir, and docdir, unless the fully expanded directory name already contains the string postgres or pgsql. For example, if you choose /usr/local as prefix, the documentation will be installed in /usr/local/doc/postgresql, but if the prefix is /opt/postgres, then it will be in /opt/postgres/doc. The public C header files of the client interfaces are installed into includedir and are namespace-clean. The internal header files and the server header files are installed into private directories under includedir. See the documentation of each interface for information about how to access its header files. Finally, a private subdirectory will also be created, if appropriate, under libdir for dynamically loadable modules. --with-extra-version=STRING Append STRING to the PostgreSQL version number. You can use this, for example, to mark binaries built from unreleased Git snapshots or containing custom patches with an extra version string such as a git describe identifier or a distribution package release number. --with-includes=DIRECTORIES DIRECTORIES is a colon-separated list of directories that will be added to the list the compiler searches for header files. If you have optional packages (such as GNU Readline) installed in a non-standard location, you have to use this option and probably also the corresponding --with-libraries option. Example: --with-includes=/opt/gnu/include:/usr/sup/include. --with-libraries=DIRECTORIES DIRECTORIES is a colon-separated list of directories to search for libraries. You will probably have to use this option (and the corresponding --with-includes option) if you have packages installed in non-standard locations. Example: --with-libraries=/opt/gnu/lib:/usr/sup/lib. --enable-nls=LANGUAGES Enables Native Language Support (NLS), that is, the ability to display a program's messages in a language other than English. LANGUAGES is an optional space-separated list of codes of the languages that you want supported, for example --enable-nls='de fr'. (The intersection between your list and the set of actually provided translations will be computed automatically.) If you do not specify a list, then all available translations are installed. To use this option, you will need an implementation of the Gettext API; see above. --with-pgport=NUMBER Set NUMBER as the default port number for server and clients. The default is 5432. The port can always be changed later on, but if you specify it here then both server and clients will have the same default compiled in, which can be very convenient. Usually the only good reason to select a non-default value is if you intend to run multiple PostgreSQL servers on the same machine. --with-perl Build the PL/Perl server-side language. --with-python Build the PL/Python server-side language. --with-tcl Build the PL/Tcl server-side language. --with-tclconfig=DIRECTORY Tcl installs the file tclConfig.sh, which contains configuration information needed to build modules interfacing to Tcl. This file is normally found automatically at a well-known location, but if you want to use a different version of Tcl you can specify the directory in which to look for it. --with-gssapi Build with support for GSSAPI authentication. On many systems, the GSSAPI (usually a part of the Kerberos installation) system is not installed in a location that is searched by default (e.g., /usr/include, /usr/lib), so you must use the options --with-includes and --with-libraries in addition to this option. configure will check for the required header files and libraries to make sure that your GSSAPI installation is sufficient before proceeding. --with-krb-srvnam=NAME The default name of the Kerberos service principal used by GSSAPI. postgres is the default. There's usually no reason to change this unless you have a Windows environment, in which case it must be set to upper case POSTGRES. --with-icu Build with support for the ICUICU library. This requires the ICU4C package as well as pkg-configpkg-config to be installed. The minimum required version of ICU4C is currently 4.6. --with-openssl OpenSSL SSL Build with support for SSL (encrypted) connections. This requires the OpenSSL package to be installed. configure will check for the required header files and libraries to make sure that your OpenSSL installation is sufficient before proceeding. --with-pam Build with PAMPAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) support. --with-bsd-auth Build with BSD Authentication support. (The BSD Authentication framework is currently only available on OpenBSD.) --with-ldap Build with LDAPLDAP support for authentication and connection parameter lookup (see and ]]> for more information). On Unix, this requires the OpenLDAP package to be installed. On Windows, the default WinLDAP library is used. configure will check for the required header files and libraries to make sure that your OpenLDAP installation is sufficient before proceeding. --with-systemd Build with support for systemdsystemd service notifications. This improves integration if the server binary is started under systemd but has no impact otherwise for more information]]>. libsystemd and the associated header files need to be installed to be able to use this option. --without-readline Prevents use of the Readline library (and libedit as well). This option disables command-line editing and history in psql, so it is not recommended. --with-libedit-preferred Favors the use of the BSD-licensed libedit library rather than GPL-licensed Readline. This option is significant only if you have both libraries installed; the default in that case is to use Readline. --with-bonjour Build with Bonjour support. This requires Bonjour support in your operating system. Recommended on macOS. --with-uuid=LIBRARY Build the ]]> module (which provides functions to generate UUIDs), using the specified UUID library.UUID LIBRARY must be one of: bsd to use the UUID functions found in FreeBSD, NetBSD, and some other BSD-derived systems e2fs to use the UUID library created by the e2fsprogs project; this library is present in most Linux systems and in macOS, and can be obtained for other platforms as well ossp to use the OSSP UUID library --with-ossp-uuid Obsolete equivalent of --with-uuid=ossp. --with-libxml Build with libxml (enables SQL/XML support). Libxml version 2.6.23 or later is required for this feature. Libxml installs a program xml2-config that can be used to detect the required compiler and linker options. PostgreSQL will use it automatically if found. To specify a libxml installation at an unusual location, you can either set the environment variable XML2_CONFIG to point to the xml2-config program belonging to the installation, or use the options --with-includes and --with-libraries. --with-libxslt Use libxslt when building the ]]> module. xml2 relies on this library to perform XSL transformations of XML. --disable-float4-byval Disable passing float4 values by value, causing them to be passed by reference instead. This option costs performance, but may be needed for compatibility with old user-defined functions that are written in C and use the version 0 calling convention. A better long-term solution is to update any such functions to use the version 1 calling convention. --disable-float8-byval Disable passing float8 values by value, causing them to be passed by reference instead. This option costs performance, but may be needed for compatibility with old user-defined functions that are written in C and use the version 0 calling convention. A better long-term solution is to update any such functions to use the version 1 calling convention. Note that this option affects not only float8, but also int8 and some related types such as timestamp. On 32-bit platforms, --disable-float8-byval is the default and it is not allowed to select --enable-float8-byval. --with-segsize=SEGSIZE Set the segment size, in gigabytes. Large tables are divided into multiple operating-system files, each of size equal to the segment size. This avoids problems with file size limits that exist on many platforms. The default segment size, 1 gigabyte, is safe on all supported platforms. If your operating system has largefile support (which most do, nowadays), you can use a larger segment size. This can be helpful to reduce the number of file descriptors consumed when working with very large tables. But be careful not to select a value larger than is supported by your platform and the file systems you intend to use. Other tools you might wish to use, such as tar, could also set limits on the usable file size. It is recommended, though not absolutely required, that this value be a power of 2. Note that changing this value requires an initdb. --with-blocksize=BLOCKSIZE Set the block size, in kilobytes. This is the unit of storage and I/O within tables. The default, 8 kilobytes, is suitable for most situations; but other values may be useful in special cases. The value must be a power of 2 between 1 and 32 (kilobytes). Note that changing this value requires an initdb. --with-wal-segsize=SEGSIZE Set the WAL segment size, in megabytes. This is the size of each individual file in the WAL log. It may be useful to adjust this size to control the granularity of WAL log shipping. The default size is 16 megabytes. The value must be a power of 2 between 1 and 1024 (megabytes). Note that changing this value requires an initdb. --with-wal-blocksize=BLOCKSIZE Set the WAL block size, in kilobytes. This is the unit of storage and I/O within the WAL log. The default, 8 kilobytes, is suitable for most situations; but other values may be useful in special cases. The value must be a power of 2 between 1 and 64 (kilobytes). Note that changing this value requires an initdb. --disable-spinlocks Allow the build to succeed even if PostgreSQL has no CPU spinlock support for the platform. The lack of spinlock support will result in poor performance; therefore, this option should only be used if the build aborts and informs you that the platform lacks spinlock support. If this option is required to build PostgreSQL on your platform, please report the problem to the PostgreSQL developers. --disable-strong-random Allow the build to succeed even if PostgreSQL has no support for strong random numbers on the platform. A source of random numbers is needed for some authentication protocols, as well as some routines in the ]]> module. --disable-strong-random disables functionality that requires cryptographically strong random numbers, and substitutes a weak pseudo-random-number-generator for the generation of authentication salt values and query cancel keys. It may make authentication less secure. --disable-thread-safety Disable the thread-safety of client libraries. This prevents concurrent threads in libpq and ECPG programs from safely controlling their private connection handles. --with-system-tzdata=DIRECTORY time zone data PostgreSQL includes its own time zone database, which it requires for date and time operations. This time zone database is in fact compatible with the IANA time zone database provided by many operating systems such as FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris, so it would be redundant to install it again. When this option is used, the system-supplied time zone database in DIRECTORY is used instead of the one included in the PostgreSQL source distribution. DIRECTORY must be specified as an absolute path. /usr/share/zoneinfo is a likely directory on some operating systems. Note that the installation routine will not detect mismatching or erroneous time zone data. If you use this option, you are advised to run the regression tests to verify that the time zone data you have pointed to works correctly with PostgreSQL. cross compilation This option is mainly aimed at binary package distributors who know their target operating system well. The main advantage of using this option is that the PostgreSQL package won't need to be upgraded whenever any of the many local daylight-saving time rules change. Another advantage is that PostgreSQL can be cross-compiled more straightforwardly if the time zone database files do not need to be built during the installation. --without-zlib zlib Prevents use of the Zlib library. This disables support for compressed archives in pg_dump and pg_restore. This option is only intended for those rare systems where this library is not available. --enable-debug Compiles all programs and libraries with debugging symbols. This means that you can run the programs in a debugger to analyze problems. This enlarges the size of the installed executables considerably, and on non-GCC compilers it usually also disables compiler optimization, causing slowdowns. However, having the symbols available is extremely helpful for dealing with any problems that might arise. Currently, this option is recommended for production installations only if you use GCC. But you should always have it on if you are doing development work or running a beta version. --enable-coverage If using GCC, all programs and libraries are compiled with code coverage testing instrumentation. When run, they generate files in the build directory with code coverage metrics. for more information.]]> This option is for use only with GCC and when doing development work. --enable-profiling If using GCC, all programs and libraries are compiled so they can be profiled. On backend exit, a subdirectory will be created that contains the gmon.out file for use in profiling. This option is for use only with GCC and when doing development work. --enable-cassert Enables assertion checks in the server, which test for many cannot happen conditions. This is invaluable for code development purposes, but the tests can slow down the server significantly. Also, having the tests turned on won't necessarily enhance the stability of your server! The assertion checks are not categorized for severity, and so what might be a relatively harmless bug will still lead to server restarts if it triggers an assertion failure. This option is not recommended for production use, but you should have it on for development work or when running a beta version. --enable-depend Enables automatic dependency tracking. With this option, the makefiles are set up so that all affected object files will be rebuilt when any header file is changed. This is useful if you are doing development work, but is just wasted overhead if you intend only to compile once and install. At present, this option only works with GCC. --enable-dtrace DTrace Compiles PostgreSQL with support for the dynamic tracing tool DTrace. for more information.]]> To point to the dtrace program, the environment variable DTRACE can be set. This will often be necessary because dtrace is typically installed under /usr/sbin, which might not be in the path. Extra command-line options for the dtrace program can be specified in the environment variable DTRACEFLAGS. On Solaris, to include DTrace support in a 64-bit binary, you must specify DTRACEFLAGS="-64" to configure. For example, using the GCC compiler: ./configure CC='gcc -m64' --enable-dtrace DTRACEFLAGS='-64' ... Using Sun's compiler: ./configure CC='/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -xtarget=native64' --enable-dtrace DTRACEFLAGS='-64' ... --enable-tap-tests Enable tests using the Perl TAP tools. This requires a Perl installation and the Perl module IPC::Run. for more information.]]> If you prefer a C compiler different from the one configure picks, you can set the environment variable CC to the program of your choice. By default, configure will pick gcc if available, else the platform's default (usually cc). Similarly, you can override the default compiler flags if needed with the CFLAGS variable. You can specify environment variables on the configure command line, for example: ./configure CC=/opt/bin/gcc CFLAGS='-O2 -pipe' Here is a list of the significant variables that can be set in this manner: BISON Bison program CC C compiler CFLAGS options to pass to the C compiler CPP C preprocessor CPPFLAGS options to pass to the C preprocessor DTRACE location of the dtrace program DTRACEFLAGS options to pass to the dtrace program FLEX Flex program LDFLAGS options to use when linking either executables or shared libraries LDFLAGS_EX additional options for linking executables only LDFLAGS_SL additional options for linking shared libraries only MSGFMT msgfmt program for native language support PERL Full path name of the Perl interpreter. This will be used to determine the dependencies for building PL/Perl. PYTHON Full path name of the Python interpreter. This will be used to determine the dependencies for building PL/Python. Also, whether Python 2 or 3 is specified here (or otherwise implicitly chosen) determines which variant of the PL/Python language becomes available. See PL/Python documentation]]> ]]> for more information. TCLSH Full path name of the Tcl interpreter. This will be used to determine the dependencies for building PL/Tcl, and it will be substituted into Tcl scripts. XML2_CONFIG xml2-config program used to locate the libxml installation. Sometimes it is useful to add compiler flags after-the-fact to the set that were chosen by configure. An important example is that gcc's -Werror option cannot be included in the CFLAGS passed to configure, because it will break many of configure's built-in tests. To add such flags, include them in the COPT environment variable while running make. The contents of COPT are added to both the CFLAGS and LDFLAGS options set up by configure. For example, you could do make COPT='-Werror' or export COPT='-Werror' make When developing code inside the server, it is recommended to use the configure options --enable-cassert (which turns on many run-time error checks) and --enable-debug (which improves the usefulness of debugging tools). If using GCC, it is best to build with an optimization level of at least -O1, because using no optimization (-O0) disables some important compiler warnings (such as the use of uninitialized variables). However, non-zero optimization levels can complicate debugging because stepping through compiled code will usually not match up one-to-one with source code lines. If you get confused while trying to debug optimized code, recompile the specific files of interest with -O0. An easy way to do this is by passing an option to make: make PROFILE=-O0 file.o. The COPT and PROFILE environment variables are actually handled identically by the PostgreSQL makefiles. Which to use is a matter of preference, but a common habit among developers is to use PROFILE for one-time flag adjustments, while COPT might be kept set all the time. To start the build, type: make (Remember to use GNU make.) The build will take a few minutes depending on your hardware. The last line displayed should be: All of PostgreSQL successfully made. Ready to install. If you want to build everything that can be built, including the documentation (HTML and man pages), and the additional modules (contrib), type instead: make world The last line displayed should be: PostgreSQL, contrib, and documentation 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: make check (This won't work as root; do it as an unprivileged user.) src/test/regress/README and the documentation 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 be sure to read ]]> which has instructions about upgrading a cluster. To install PostgreSQL enter: make 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 can create the target directories in advance and arrange for appropriate permissions to be granted. To install the documentation (HTML and man pages), enter: make install-docs If you built the world above, type instead: make install-world This also installs the documentation. You can use make install-strip instead of make 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. The standard installation provides all the header files needed for client application development as well as for server-side program development, such as custom functions or data types written in C. (Prior to PostgreSQL 8.0, a separate make install-all-headers command was needed for the latter, but this step has been folded into the standard install.) If you want to install only the client applications and interface libraries, then you can use these commands: make -C src/bin install make -C src/include install make -C src/interfaces install make -C doc install src/bin has a few binaries for server-only use, but they are small. To undo the installation use the command make uninstall. However, this will not remove any created directories. After the installation you can free disk space by removing the built files from the source tree with the command make clean. This will preserve the files made by the configure program, so that you can rebuild everything with make later on. To reset the source tree to the state in which it was distributed, use make distclean. If you are going to build for several platforms within the same source tree you must do this and re-configure for each platform. (Alternatively, use a separate build tree for each platform, so that the source tree remains unmodified.) If you perform a build and then discover that your configure options were wrong, or if you change anything that configure investigates (for example, software upgrades), then it's a good idea to do make distclean before reconfiguring and rebuilding. Without this, your changes in configuration choices might not propagate everywhere they need to. shared library On some systems with shared libraries you need to tell the system how to find the newly installed shared libraries. The systems on which this is not necessary include FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. The method to set the shared library search path varies between platforms, but the most widely-used 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. On Cygwin, put the library directory in the PATH or move the .dll files into the bin directory. If in doubt, refer to the manual pages of your system (perhaps ld.so or rld). If you later 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 Linux 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 should add /usr/local/pgsql/bin (or whatever you set --bindir to in ) into your PATH. Strictly speaking, this is not necessary, but it will make the use of PostgreSQL much more convenient. 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 all users): PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/bin:$PATH export PATH If you are using csh or tcsh, then use this command: set path = ( /usr/local/pgsql/bin $path ) MANPATH To enable your system to find the man documentation, you need to add lines like the following to a shell start-up file unless you installed into a location that is searched by default: MANPATH=/usr/local/pgsql/share/man:$MANPATH export 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 main documentation 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. At this point, if you did not use the initdb -A option, you might want to modify pg_hba.conf to control local access to the server before you start it. The default is to trust all local users. The previous initdb 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/postgres -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/postgres -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` 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 first few chapters of the main documentation are the Tutorial, which 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 part on server administration, 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 documentation. Run the regression tests against the installed server (using make installcheck). If you didn't run the tests before installation, you should definitely do it now. This is also explained in the documentation. By default, PostgreSQL is configured to run on minimal hardware. This allows it to start up with almost any hardware configuration. The default configuration is, however, not designed for optimum performance. To achieve optimum performance, several server parameters must be adjusted, the two most common being shared_buffers and work_mem. Other parameters mentioned in the documentation also affect performance. ]]> A platform (that is, a CPU architecture and operating system combination) is considered supported by the PostgreSQL development community if the code contains provisions to work on that platform and it has recently been verified to build and pass its regression tests on that platform. Currently, most testing of platform compatibility is done automatically by test machines in the PostgreSQL Build Farm. If you are interested in using PostgreSQL on a platform that is not represented in the build farm, but on which the code works or can be made to work, you are strongly encouraged to set up a build farm member machine so that continued compatibility can be assured. In general, PostgreSQL can be expected to work on these CPU architectures: x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, PowerPC 64, S/390, S/390x, Sparc, Sparc 64, ARM, MIPS, MIPSEL, and PA-RISC. Code support exists for M68K, M32R, and VAX, but these architectures are not known to have been tested recently. It is often possible to build on an unsupported CPU type by configuring with --disable-spinlocks, but performance will be poor. PostgreSQL can be expected to work on these operating systems: Linux (all recent distributions), Windows (Win2000 SP4 and later), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, macOS, AIX, HP/UX, and Solaris. Other Unix-like systems may also work but are not currently being tested. In most cases, all CPU architectures supported by a given operating system will work. Look in below to see if there is information specific to your operating system, particularly if using an older system. If you have installation problems on a platform that is known to be supported according to recent build farm results, please report it to pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org. If you are interested in porting PostgreSQL to a new platform, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org is the appropriate place to discuss that. This section documents additional platform-specific issues regarding the installation and setup of PostgreSQL. Be sure to read the installation instructions, and in particular as well. Also, check src/test/regress/README and the documentation]]> ]]> regarding the interpretation of regression test results. Platforms that are not covered here have no known platform-specific installation issues. AIX installation on PostgreSQL works on AIX, but getting it installed properly can be challenging. AIX versions from 4.3.3 to 6.1 are considered supported. You can use GCC or the native IBM compiler xlc. In general, using recent versions of AIX and PostgreSQL helps. Check the build farm for up to date information about which versions of AIX are known to work. The minimum recommended fix levels for supported AIX versions are: AIX 4.3.3 Maintenance Level 11 + post ML11 bundle AIX 5.1 Maintenance Level 9 + post ML9 bundle AIX 5.2 Technology Level 10 Service Pack 3 AIX 5.3 Technology Level 7 AIX 6.1 Base Level To check your current fix level, use oslevel -r in AIX 4.3.3 to AIX 5.2 ML 7, or oslevel -s in later versions. Use the following configure flags in addition to your own if you have installed Readline or libz in /usr/local: --with-includes=/usr/local/include --with-libraries=/usr/local/lib. On AIX 5.3, there have been some problems getting PostgreSQL to compile and run using GCC. You will want to use a version of GCC subsequent to 3.3.2, particularly if you use a prepackaged version. We had good success with 4.0.1. Problems with earlier versions seem to have more to do with the way IBM packaged GCC than with actual issues with GCC, so that if you compile GCC yourself, you might well have success with an earlier version of GCC. AIX 5.3 has a problem where sockaddr_storage is not defined to be large enough. In version 5.3, IBM increased the size of sockaddr_un, the address structure for Unix-domain sockets, but did not correspondingly increase the size of sockaddr_storage. The result of this is that attempts to use Unix-domain sockets with PostgreSQL lead to libpq overflowing the data structure. TCP/IP connections work OK, but not Unix-domain sockets, which prevents the regression tests from working. The problem was reported to IBM, and is recorded as bug report PMR29657. If you upgrade to maintenance level 5300-03 or later, that will include this fix. A quick workaround is to alter _SS_MAXSIZE to 1025 in /usr/include/sys/socket.h. In either case, recompile PostgreSQL once you have the corrected header file. PostgreSQL relies on the system's getaddrinfo function to parse IP addresses in listen_addresses, pg_hba.conf, etc. Older versions of AIX have assorted bugs in this function. If you have problems related to these settings, updating to the appropriate AIX fix level shown above should take care of it. One user reports: When implementing PostgreSQL version 8.1 on AIX 5.3, we periodically ran into problems where the statistics collector would mysteriously not come up successfully. This appears to be the result of unexpected behavior in the IPv6 implementation. It looks like PostgreSQL and IPv6 do not play very well together on AIX 5.3. Any of the following actions fix the problem. Delete the IPv6 address for localhost: (as root) # ifconfig lo0 inet6 ::1/0 delete Remove IPv6 from net services. The file /etc/netsvc.conf on AIX is roughly equivalent to /etc/nsswitch.conf on Solaris/Linux. The default, on AIX, is thus: hosts=local,bind Replace this with: hosts=local4,bind4 to deactivate searching for IPv6 addresses. This is really a workaround for problems relating to immaturity of IPv6 support, which improved visibly during the course of AIX 5.3 releases. It has worked with AIX version 5.3, but does not represent an elegant solution to the problem. It has been reported that this workaround is not only unnecessary, but causes problems on AIX 6.1, where IPv6 support has become more mature. AIX can be somewhat peculiar with regards to the way it does memory management. You can have a server with many multiples of gigabytes of RAM free, but still get out of memory or address space errors when running applications. One example is loading of extensions failing with unusual errors. For example, running as the owner of the PostgreSQL installation: =# CREATE EXTENSION plperl; ERROR: could not load library "/opt/dbs/pgsql/lib/plperl.so": A memory address is not in the address space for the process. Running as a non-owner in the group possessing the PostgreSQL installation: =# CREATE EXTENSION plperl; ERROR: could not load library "/opt/dbs/pgsql/lib/plperl.so": Bad address Another example is out of memory errors in the PostgreSQL server logs, with every memory allocation near or greater than 256 MB failing. The overall cause of all these problems is the default bittedness and memory model used by the server process. By default, all binaries built on AIX are 32-bit. This does not depend upon hardware type or kernel in use. These 32-bit processes are limited to 4 GB of memory laid out in 256 MB segments using one of a few models. The default allows for less than 256 MB in the heap as it shares a single segment with the stack. In the case of the plperl example, above, check your umask and the permissions of the binaries in your PostgreSQL installation. The binaries involved in that example were 32-bit and installed as mode 750 instead of 755. Due to the permissions being set in this fashion, only the owner or a member of the possessing group can load the library. Since it isn't world-readable, the loader places the object into the process' heap instead of the shared library segments where it would otherwise be placed. The ideal solution for this is to use a 64-bit build of PostgreSQL, but that is not always practical, because systems with 32-bit processors can build, but not run, 64-bit binaries. If a 32-bit binary is desired, set LDR_CNTRL to MAXDATA=0xn0000000, where 1 <= n <= 8, before starting the PostgreSQL server, and try different values and postgresql.conf settings to find a configuration that works satisfactorily. This use of LDR_CNTRL tells AIX that you want the server to have MAXDATA bytes set aside for the heap, allocated in 256 MB segments. When you find a workable configuration, ldedit can be used to modify the binaries so that they default to using the desired heap size. PostgreSQL can also be rebuilt, passing configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-bmaxdata:0xn0000000" to achieve the same effect. For a 64-bit build, set OBJECT_MODE to 64 and pass CC="gcc -maix64" and LDFLAGS="-Wl,-bbigtoc" to configure. (Options for xlc might differ.) If you omit the export of OBJECT_MODE, your build may fail with linker errors. When OBJECT_MODE is set, it tells AIX's build utilities such as ar, as, and ld what type of objects to default to handling. By default, overcommit of paging space can happen. While we have not seen this occur, AIX will kill processes when it runs out of memory and the overcommit is accessed. The closest to this that we have seen is fork failing because the system decided that there was not enough memory for another process. Like many other parts of AIX, the paging space allocation method and out-of-memory kill is configurable on a system- or process-wide basis if this becomes a problem. IBM Redbook Cygwin installation on PostgreSQL can be built using Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows, but that method is inferior to the native Windows build )]]> and running a server under Cygwin is no longer recommended. When building from source, proceed according to the normal installation procedure (i.e., ./configure; make; etc.), noting the following-Cygwin specific differences: Set your path to use the Cygwin bin directory before the Windows utilities. This will help prevent problems with compilation. The adduser command is not supported; use the appropriate user management application on Windows NT, 2000, or XP. Otherwise, skip this step. The su command is not supported; use ssh to simulate su on Windows NT, 2000, or XP. Otherwise, skip this step. OpenSSL is not supported. Start cygserver for shared memory support. To do this, enter the command /usr/sbin/cygserver &. This program needs to be running anytime you start the PostgreSQL server or initialize a database cluster (initdb). The default cygserver configuration may need to be changed (e.g., increase SEMMNS) to prevent PostgreSQL from failing due to a lack of system resources. Building might fail on some systems where a locale other than C is in use. To fix this, set the locale to C by doing export LANG=C.utf8 before building, and then setting it back to the previous setting, after you have installed PostgreSQL. The parallel regression tests (make check) can generate spurious regression test failures due to overflowing the listen() backlog queue which causes connection refused errors or hangs. You can limit the number of connections using the make variable MAX_CONNECTIONS thus: make MAX_CONNECTIONS=5 check (On some systems you can have up to about 10 simultaneous connections). It is possible to install cygserver and the PostgreSQL server as Windows NT services. For information on how to do this, please refer to the README document included with the PostgreSQL binary package on Cygwin. It is installed in the directory /usr/share/doc/Cygwin. HP-UX installation on PostgreSQL 7.3+ should work on Series 700/800 PA-RISC machines running HP-UX 10.X or 11.X, given appropriate system patch levels and build tools. At least one developer routinely tests on HP-UX 10.20, and we have reports of successful installations on HP-UX 11.00 and 11.11. Aside from the PostgreSQL source distribution, you will need GNU make (HP's make will not do), and either GCC or HP's full ANSI C compiler. If you intend to build from Git sources rather than a distribution tarball, you will also need Flex (GNU lex) and Bison (GNU yacc). We also recommend making sure you are fairly up-to-date on HP patches. At a minimum, if you are building 64 bit binaries on HP-UX 11.11 you may need PHSS_30966 (11.11) or a successor patch otherwise initdb may hang: PHSS_30966 s700_800 ld(1) and linker tools cumulative patch On general principles you should be current on libc and ld/dld patches, as well as compiler patches if you are using HP's C compiler. See HP's support sites such as and for free copies of their latest patches. If you are building on a PA-RISC 2.0 machine and want to have 64-bit binaries using GCC, you must use GCC 64-bit version. GCC binaries for HP-UX PA-RISC and Itanium are available from . Don't forget to get and install binutils at the same time. If you are building on a PA-RISC 2.0 machine and want the compiled binaries to run on PA-RISC 1.1 machines you will need to specify +DAportable in CFLAGS. If you are building on a HP-UX Itanium machine, you will need the latest HP ANSI C compiler with its dependent patch or successor patches: PHSS_30848 s700_800 HP C Compiler (A.05.57) PHSS_30849 s700_800 u2comp/be/plugin library Patch If you have both HP's C compiler and GCC's, then you might want to explicitly select the compiler to use when you run configure: ./configure CC=cc for HP's C compiler, or ./configure CC=gcc for GCC. If you omit this setting, then configure will pick gcc if it has a choice. The default install target location is /usr/local/pgsql, which you might want to change to something under /opt. If so, use the --prefix switch to configure. In the regression tests, there might be some low-order-digit differences in the geometry tests, which vary depending on which compiler and math library versions you use. Any other error is cause for suspicion. MinGW installation on PostgreSQL for Windows can be built using MinGW, a Unix-like build environment for Microsoft operating systems, or using Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler suite. The MinGW build variant uses the normal build system described in this chapter; the Visual C++ build works completely differently and is described in ]]>. It is a fully native build and uses no additional software like MinGW. A ready-made installer is available on the main PostgreSQL web site. The native Windows port requires a 32 or 64-bit version of Windows 2000 or later. Earlier operating systems do not have sufficient infrastructure (but Cygwin may be used on those). MinGW, the Unix-like build tools, and MSYS, a collection of Unix tools required to run shell scripts like configure, can be downloaded from . Neither is required to run the resulting binaries; they are needed only for creating the binaries. To build 64 bit binaries using MinGW, install the 64 bit tool set from , put its bin directory in the PATH, and run configure with the --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 option. After you have everything installed, it is suggested that you run psql under CMD.EXE, as the MSYS console has buffering issues. If PostgreSQL on Windows crashes, it has the ability to generate minidumps that can be used to track down the cause for the crash, similar to core dumps on Unix. These dumps can be read using the Windows Debugger Tools or using Visual Studio. To enable the generation of dumps on Windows, create a subdirectory named crashdumps inside the cluster data directory. The dumps will then be written into this directory with a unique name based on the identifier of the crashing process and the current time of the crash. Solaris installation on PostgreSQL is well-supported on Solaris. The more up to date your operating system, the fewer issues you will experience; details below. You can build with either GCC or Sun's compiler suite. For better code optimization, Sun's compiler is strongly recommended on the SPARC architecture. We have heard reports of problems when using GCC 2.95.1; GCC 2.95.3 or later is recommended. If you are using Sun's compiler, be careful not to select /usr/ucb/cc; use /opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc. You can download Sun Studio from . Many of GNU tools are integrated into Solaris 10, or they are present on the Solaris companion CD. If you like packages for older version of Solaris, you can find these tools at . If you prefer sources, look at . If configure complains about a failed test program, this is probably a case of the run-time linker being unable to find some library, probably libz, libreadline or some other non-standard library such as libssl. To point it to the right location, set the LDFLAGS environment variable on the configure command line, e.g., configure ... LDFLAGS="-R /usr/sfw/lib:/opt/sfw/lib:/usr/local/lib" See the ld1 man page for more information. On Solaris 7 and older, the 64-bit version of libc has a buggy vsnprintf routine, which leads to erratic core dumps in PostgreSQL. The simplest known workaround is to force PostgreSQL to use its own version of vsnprintf rather than the library copy. To do this, after you run configure edit a file produced by configure: In src/Makefile.global, change the line LIBOBJS = to read LIBOBJS = snprintf.o (There might be other files already listed in this variable. Order does not matter.) Then build as usual. On the SPARC architecture, Sun Studio is strongly recommended for compilation. Try using the -xO5 optimization flag to generate significantly faster binaries. Do not use any flags that modify behavior of floating-point operations and errno processing (e.g., -fast). These flags could raise some nonstandard PostgreSQL behavior for example in the date/time computing. If you do not have a reason to use 64-bit binaries on SPARC, prefer the 32-bit version. The 64-bit operations are slower and 64-bit binaries are slower than the 32-bit variants. And on other hand, 32-bit code on the AMD64 CPU family is not native, and that is why 32-bit code is significant slower on this CPU family. Yes, using DTrace is possible. See ]]> for further information. You can also find more information in this article: . If you see the linking of the postgres executable abort with an error message like: Undefined first referenced symbol in file AbortTransaction utils/probes.o CommitTransaction utils/probes.o ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to postgres collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [postgres] Error 1 your DTrace installation is too old to handle probes in static functions. You need Solaris 10u4 or newer.