Glenn Street

Prerequisites

Last week I discussed various reasons why you would want to compile your open-source database from the project’s source code.  I wanted to give an example here of the process for compiling a particular database, PostgreSQL.  Version 9.1 of PostgreSQL was released on 2011-09-11, so the example below works with that code base.

I’m assuming in the following instructions that you’re starting with a sparkling, new Fedora installation.  In other words, you haven’t installed any of the dependencies (e.g., gcc, make, bison) that you’ll need for building the PostgreSQL source code.  I used Fedora 15, 64-bit.

$ sudo yum install git

$ sudo yum-builddep postgresql

$ sudo yum install gcc

Check out the Source Code using Git

Grabbing the code via git is a very simple one-line command.

$ git clone git://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git

Configure the Build

$ cd postgresql
$ ./configure --with-libxml --with-libxslt

Make and Install

$ gmake

$ sudo gmake install

Post-Installation and Database Configuration

You’ll want to run PostgreSQL as a specific, non-root user, postgres.  So, create this user.

$ sudo adduser postgres
$ sudo passwd postgres

Now, change user to the newborn postgres user to run the database initialization.

$ su - postgres

First, set the environment variables for locating needed libraries and executables.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
$ PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/pgsql/bin; export PATH

Now, create a directory to contain the server’s data files.

$ mkdir <directory_for_database_data_files>

Run the initdb command to initialize the PostgreSQL server.

$ initdb -D <directory_for_database_data_files>

I recommend creating a specific directory for the server log files.

$ mkdir <directory_for_server_log_files>

Starting the Server

Start the server as the postgres user, indicating the location of data files and the location of the server log files.

$ postgres -D <directory_for_data files> ><directory_for_server_log_files>/server.log 2>&1 &

There shouldn’t be any errors that prevent the server from starting, but if you inspect the log file you should see the following messages.

LOG: database system is ready to accept connections
LOG: autovacuum launcher started

Your server should be up and running, ready to accept your client connections!