How to Install Postgresql in Chakra Linux Aug 31 2015

One of the basic packages we need as developers is a Database Management System (DBMS). The one I use most is Postgresql and here I’m going to show how to install it in Chakra Linux that probably will work on other Arch derived distros. This installation is for development purpose only.

The first thing we need to do is install the package postgresql.

$ sudo pacman -S postgresql

Now, we can run the server by executing the service as root:

$ sudo systemctl start postgresql.service
Job for postgresql.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status postgresql.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

It seems that our server couldn’t start. New versions of postgresql in chakra needs a process to be run previously. To do that, we need to login as postgres user.

$ sudo su postgres

Now, we need to initialize the database with the configuration we want. Change es_MX to en_US for example.

[postgres]$ initdb --locale es_MX.UTF-8 -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data'

Now, as normal a user (not postgres), we can start our server.

$ sudo systemctl start postgresql.service

If we don’t see any errors, it means that the server is running and accepting connections.

As postgres user, we can create the rest of the users right now. The easiest way to do that is interactively.

[postgres]$ createuser --interactive

We can now create a new database.

$ createdb <DBNAME> -U <USERNAME>

Change with the user name you just created and with the actual database name. Note that the option -U should be capital letter.

We can access our database by typing:

$ psql <DBNAME> -U <USERNAME>

We should be in postgresql prompt now and that means we succeed. Type \q to exit.

If we reboot our system now, we will see that postgresql doesn’t start automatically. This is because we haven’t enabled it. Let’s check it:

$ systemctl is-enabled postgresql.service
disabled

As we can see, it is disabled for autoloading at start. We can enable it easily:

$ sudo systemctl enable postgresql.service
$ systemctl is-enabled postgresql.service
enabled

And we have our postgresql server ready. Enjoy!