Starting the server manually

Normally, a PostgreSQL server will start automatically when the system boots up. If an automatic start is not enabled for a server, we would need to start the server manually. This may be required even for operational reasons.

Getting ready

Before we talk about how to start the database server, first we need to understand the difference between server and service. The term server refers to the database server and its processes, whereas the term service essentially indicates the operating system wrapper through which the server gets called.

How to do it...

On a majority of platforms, that is, Linux and Unix distributions, we can start the server using the pg_ctl command-line utility as shown here:

pg_ctl -D <location of data directory> start

Consider the following example:

pg_ctl -D /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data start

The -D switch of the pg_ctl command indicates the data directory of the PostgreSQL server. In the preceding command, the data directory is defined at...