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.
To grab the most up-to-date Postgres code, you’ll want to check it out from the git repository. If git is not installed on your system, install it.
There are a number of libraries and software programs that you’ll need if you’re going to build PostgresSQL. The easiest way to get all of them is to use the yum-builddep command. (This will also install flex, bison, and Perl, if they are not already present on your system).
$ sudo yum-builddep postgresql
Among other software and libraries, yum should offer to install bison, flex, and tcl. However, yum-builddep for postgresql does not install the gcc compiler, which you will also need. To get gcc installed, run the command:
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
This checks the source code out into a sub-directory of your current location, called postgresql.
Configure the Build
A full list of the configuration options available at the command line is described in the “
PostgreSQL 9.1.0 Documentation“. For this example, I ran a fairly vanilla configuration, but added features for SQL/XML in the database.
$ cd postgresql
$ ./configure --with-libxml --with-libxslt
Make and Install
Now that you’ve fine-tuned exactly how you want Postgres built, you’ll run the fairly standard make and install steps.
Note that you must run the install step as a privileged user, since access to the /usr/local directory (it’s there, at /usr/local/pgsql/bin, that the binary files will live) is restricted by default.
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
Run the initdb command to initialize the PostgreSQL server.
$ initdb -D
I recommend creating a specific directory for the server log files.
$ mkdir
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 >/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!
