Installing,Starting,Stopping PostgreSQL Server on Linux OS

In this post, we will see how to Install and Run PostgreSQL on Linux machines.

There are three ways to installation procedures to download the software.

1. Binary Installation
2. Yum Installation
3. RPM Installation

In this post, will see how to install PostgreSQL using Binary installation.

1. Download the binaries from the official website.

$ wget https://get.enterprisedb.com/postgresql/postgresql-9.6.2-4-linux-x64-binaries.tar.gz

2. Untar the downloaded binaries.

$ tar -xvzf postgresql-9.6.2-4-linux-x64-binaries.tar.gz

3. Create appropriate data directories and permissions with root user to run PostgreSQL Server.

# mkdir -p  /var/lib/pgsql/data
# chown -R psql /var/lib/pgsql/data
# su psql

4. Now change the directory path to the downloaded software path

$ cd /home/psql/softwares/pgsql

5. Initialize the data directories required for PostgreSQL to run, there are two ways to initialize the directories.

$ initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

Alternatively, we can also initialize using pg_ctl
pg_ctl - pg_ctl is a utility to initialize, start, stop, or control a PostgreSQL server

$ pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgsql/data initdb

6. After successfully initializing the data directory, we need to start the server using the below command.

$ /home/psql/softwares/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/lib/pgsql/data -l logfile start

7. Before login into the shell, create a test database to login

Note: When logging to the server for the first time you won't have any access enabled. To enable the access do below steps:

$ cd /home/psql/softwares/pgsql/bin/
$ ./psql template1
psql.bin (9.6.2)
Type "help" for help.

template1=# CREATE DATABASE mydb;
CREATE DATABASE

8. Once the database is created you can login using the database which you have created like below.

$psql mydb
psql.bin (9.6.2)
Type "help" for help.

mydb=# 

mydb=# select version();
                                                 version
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 PostgreSQL 9.6.2 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-16), 64-bit
(1 row)

mydb=# select current_date;
    date
------------
 2017-05-04
(1 row)

mydb=# select 5 + 5;
 ?column?
----------
       10
(1 row)

mydb=# \q

9. And, finally to shutdown database use below commands.

$ /home/psql/softwares/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/lib/pgsql/data -l logfile stop
waiting for server to shut down.... done
server stopped

So, that's it for this post, will have a look at other two installations in the coming posts.