When I am training people, they ask me on a regular basis which version of PostgreSQL they should use. The answer to this question is simple; if you have the ability to decide freely, it is absolutely safe to use the latest stable release of PostgreSQL, even if it is a "zero" release (which is equal to 9.4.0, 9.3.0, and so on).

Let's focus on installing PostgreSQL on Debian or Ubuntu first. The key point here is that it is recommended to add the PostgreSQL repositories to Ubuntu. The reason is that many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, ship very old and outdated versions of PostgreSQL in their standard setup. If you don't want to miss a couple of years of PostgreSQL development, adding the current repositories will be highly beneficial to you. The process of adding the repositories is as follows:

The installation process on Red Hat-based distributions works in a pretty similar way. Many distributions use RPM packages. The following URL shows the distributions for which we are currently ready to use RPMs: http://yum.postgresql.org/repopackages.php.

The first thing to do is to install an RPM package containing all the repository information. Once this is done, we can easily fetch PostgreSQL RPMs from the repository and fire things up in almost no time.

In our example, we chose Fedora 20 as our distribution. To enable the repository, we can run the following command (as root):

yum install http://yum.postgresql.org/9.4/fedora/fedora-20-x86_64/pgdg-fedora94-9.4-1.noarch.rpm

Once the repository has been added, we can install PostgreSQL by using the following commands:

yum install postgresql94-server postgresql94-contrib
/usr/pgsql-9.4/bin/postgresql94-setup initdb
systemctl enable postgresql-9.4.service
systemctl start postgresql-9.4.service

The first command (yum install) will fetch the packages from the repository and install them on your server. Once this is done, we can prepare a database instance and initialize it.

Finally, we enable the service and start it up. Our database server is now ready for action.

Before we get started, we have to download the tarball from http://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/. There, you will find one directory per version of PostgreSQL. In our case, we have downloaded PostgreSQL 9.4.1, and we will use it throughout this chapter.

The first thing we have to do is to extract the tar archive:

tar xvfz postgresql-9.4.1.tar.gz

This will create a directory containing the PostgreSQL source code. Once we have entered this directory, we can call configure, which will then check your system to see if all libraries you need are present. It generates vital parts of the build infrastructure.

Here is how it works:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/pg941

In our example, we used the most simplistic of all configurations. We want to install the binaries to a directory called /usr/local/pg941. Note that this is not where the data will end up; it is where the executables will reside. If you don't define –prefix, the default installation path will be /usr/local/pgsql.

Of course, there is a lot more. Try running the following command:

./configure --help

If you run the preceding command, you will see that there are some more features that can be turned on (for example, --with-perl or --with-python) in case you are planning to write stored procedures in Perl or Python.

In some cases, you might find that our operating system lacks libraries needed to compile PostgreSQL properly. Some of the most common candidates are libreadline-dev and zlib-dev (of course there are some more). These two libraries are needed to enable the command-line history as well as to give support for compression. We highly recommend providing both libraries to PostgreSQL.

If you are compiling on a more exotic Unix operating system such as Solaris, AIX, and so on, we recommend you to check out the documentation regarding the platform specifications.

We can move forward and actually compile PostgreSQL, using the following commands:

make
make install

You just have to call make and make install (as root) and wait for a few seconds. In this case, we simply use one CPU core to build PostgreSQL. If you want to scale out the build process to many CPU cores, you can use –j, shown as follows:

make -j 8

The -j 8 command will tell make to do up to 8 things in parallel, if possible. Adding parallelism to the build process will definitely speed up the process. It is not uncommon to build PostgreSQL in 30 seconds or less if there are enough CPU cores on board.

It is highly recommended to install the PostgreSQL contrib packages as well. Contrib is a set of additional modules that can be used for different purposes such as creating database links from PostgreSQL, to PostgreSQL, or for adding an additional indexing functionality.

If you are installing PostgreSQL from binary packages, you can simply install one more package (for example, postgresql-9.3-contrib). If you happen to install from source, you have to perform the following steps:

cd contrib
make
make install

Of course, you can also use the -j flag again to scale out to more than just one CPU. The make install command will need root permissions again (for example, via sudo).

Once the binaries have been installed, we can move forward and finalize our installation. The following steps are to be carried out in order to finalize our installation:

If you have installed PostgreSQL from binary packages, the system will automatically create a user for PostgreSQL. If you happen to compile it yourself, you have to create the operating system user yourself too.

Depending on the operating system you are using, this works in a slightly different way. On Ubuntu, for instance, you can call adduser on Red Hat and useradd on CentOS. I really recommend looking up the procedure to create a user in your operating system manual.

In general, it's best practice to create a user named postgres; however, a nonroot user will also do. I just recommend sticking to the standard to make life easier on the administration front.

Once the user has been created, it is, in general, a good idea to prepare your infrastructure for PostgreSQL. This implies adjusting your $PATH environment variable. On most Linux systems, this can be done in your .bash_profile or .bashrc file. Having your favorite PostgreSQL tools in your path will make life simple and a lot easier.

Finally, we can add the init scripts to the system. In postgresql-9.4.1/contrib/start-scripts, you will find init scripts for Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. These scripts are a good framework to make your init process work as expected.

Once we compile PostgreSQL and prepare ourselves to launch PostgreSQL, we can create a so-called PostgreSQL database instance. What is a database instance? Well, whenever you start PostgreSQL, you are actually firing up a database instance. So, the instance is really a central thing; it is that which contains all the databases, users, tablespaces, and so on.

In PostgreSQL, a database instance always resides in a database directory. In our example, we want to create the instance under /data:

mkdir /data
chown postgres.postgres /data
su - postgres
initdb -D /data -E unicode

First, we created the directory and assigned it to the postgres user. Then, we created the database instance. The important part here is that we explicitly stated (-E unicode) that we want UTF-8 to be the default character set in our system. If we don't explicitly tell the system what to use, it will check out the locale settings and use the Unix locale as the default for the instance. This might not be the desired configuration for your setup, so it is better to explicitly define the character set.

Also, instead of using -D here, we can set $PGDATA to tell PostgreSQL where the desired place for the database instance is going to be. There's also an initdb --help command that will reveal a handful of additional configuration options.

At this point, we won't go into all the configuration options as it is out of the scope of this book. However, we will point out some really useful flags, described as follows:

Once we create our database instance, we can start our database server.

Firing up PostgreSQL is easy. If we used binary packages, we can use the /etc/init.d/postgresql start or service postgresql start command (as root or by using sudo).

Note that on some Linux distros, it might be necessary to add a version number to the service (for example, /etc/init.d/postgresql-9.4 start). On non-Linux systems, you have to check out your corresponding init routines.

In case you have not installed the start scripts, you can fire up PostgreSQL manually. Assuming that our database instance resides in /data, it works like this:

pg_ctl -D /data -l /dev/null start

In the preceding command, pg_ctl is the tool to control PostgreSQL, -D tells the system where to find the database instance, -l /dev/null tells our database server to send the log information to /dev/null, and start will simply make the instance fire up.

Note that we use -l here for simplicity reasons. In later chapters, you will learn how to set up proper logging using the PostgreSQL onboard infrastructure.

Installing PostgreSQL is as simple as that.