PostgreSQL installation tutorial

installing_postgresql.md

Let's install PostgreSQL onto your operating system.

As an open source object-relational database management system, PostgreSQL available for MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

Goal for each Operating System

The goal will be to run the following command successfully from the command line (regardless of the OS):

psql -U postgres

This should open the psql interactive shell and print a prompt that looks like:

postgres=#

Installation per OS:

MacOS:

Let's walk through installing PostgreSQL with the postgresapp on Mac.

1. Visit http://postgresapp.com/
2. Download the most recent version --> Click "Download"
3. Open the application, and click "initialize" to create a new PostgreSQL server
4. Ensure that the Postgres.app bin folder has been added to your $PATH; 4.1) In the command line, enter: echo "$PATH" 4.2) Search through the output and make sure Postgres.app/Contents/Version/latest/bin is there in order to ensure that this directory's executables are callable from any directory in bash.
5. In the command line, enter: lsof -i tcp:5432, and ensure that the postgres COMMAND appears. This checks if the Postgres server is now running on port 5432 under the name localhost:postgresql

Linux:

1. Acquire the source code: wget ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v9.3.2/postgresql-9.3.2.tar.bz2
2. Install the packages needed for building Postgres: sudo apt-get install build-essential libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev flex bison libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libssl-dev

Windows:

1. Download the installer specified by EnterpriseDB for all supported PostgreSQL versions. The installer is available here: https://www.postgresql.org/download/windows/

"configure": " ./bin/configure_db.sh"

this does not work on windows, "." is not a recognized as a cmd

"configure": "sh ./bin/configure_db.sh"

In step 4.2 for macOS, what do you when you search through the output and Postgres.app/Contents/Version/latest/bin is not there? When I run echo "$PATH", I get a single line of output: /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin, which doesn't contain Postgres anything. Not sure if it makes a difference, but I ran echo "$PATH" while the present working directory was the backend directory created in the course.

For what it's worth, step 5 seems to be running OK. When I run lsof -i tcp:5432, I get two commands called postgres with a name of localhost:postgresql, one with a type of IPv6 and the other with a type of IPv4.

Looks like I managed to answer my own question… this Stack Overflow answer led me to this section of the Postgres.app documentation, which says:

Configure your $PATH
Postgres.app includes many command line tools. If you want to use them, you must configure the $PATH variable.

The easiest way to configure your PATH is to execute the following command:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/paths.d &&
echo /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin | sudo tee /etc/paths.d/postgresapp

Don’t forget to close the Terminal window and open a new one for changes to take effect.

Once I did that, I was able to get psql --help and psql -U postgres to work properly.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/paths.d &&
echo /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin | sudo tee /etc/paths.d/postgresapp

@vincentpace Thanks this worked for me