Installing PostgreSQL on OSX Server

On Jan 28, 2013, at 6:45 AM, Stephen Cook <sclists@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello!

I have convinced a client to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL (hooray), which means it falls on me to install and configure it. I'm planning on doing this from the command line (I have SSH access).

I have installed and configured PostgreSQL on Windows, FreeBSD, and a few Linux flavors, but never OSX. I have the basic directions (http://www.enterprisedb.com/resources-community/pginst-guide) and found a couple of articles / blogs, but really I'm not an Apple guy so I don't want to miss anything or screw anything up.

Is there anything I should watch out for? I have some wiggle room (this is a development server at first), but I'd rather not break anything.

uname -a returns: Darwin xxx.local 10.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0: Tue Jun 7 16:33:36 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1504.15.3~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
PostgreSQL version: Latest and greatest - 9.2.2

Thanks!

You're not planning on using this in production, I hope? OS X is a very solid desktop OS, but it's server variant is packed full of weird and plain broken behaviour.

OS X includes the postgresql clients and libraries, and OS X Server includes the postgresql server. You don't want to use the included postgresql server, or the included libpq and binaries, but you'll want to make sure that they don't clash with the version you're installing - for the server that's not too painful, but for the clients you'll want to make sure that the PATH of all users is set up to find your installed versions of psql etc. before the ones in /usr/bin, and that they're linking with the right libpq.dylib, not the one in /usr/lib. "otool -L" is the OS X equivalent to ldd.

OS X doesn't have readline installed, it has libedit. Libedit is poor compared to readline, and the OS X installed version of libedit was, for years, hideously broken such that tab completion would cause SEGVs. It might have been fixed in the latest releases, or it might not. It's worth avoiding anyway.

If you'll be installing using the point-and-click enterprisedb installer it should take care of some of the issues for you. If you end up installing from source you need to be aware that OS X is a dual-architecture system with fat binaries and libraries (for i386 and x86_64 on recent releases). Depending on what your developers are doing that may be an issue. The usual way of building fat binaries doesn't work for postgresql, or didn't the last time I tried it; you may need to build twice, once for each architecture, then glue the results together to make fat libraries.

Also, on a non-postgreql note, you'll find that the OS X userspace, particularly when it comes to system administration tools, is strange and scary compared to the unixalikes you've used. You create users with multiple dscl commands, not adduser. Daemons are managed by launchd, not started from /etc/init.d.

http://labs.wordtothewise.com/postgresql-osx/ has a few notes on building and installing from source that might be useful.

Recent versions of OS X server (10.6 and later, I think) can be installed in VMWare, as long as the host is running on Apple hardware (so either VMWare Fusion or ESXi running on a mini) if you want to build a play / staging environment where you can roll back snapshots.

Cheers,
Steve

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Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com> writes:

OS X doesn't have readline installed, it has libedit. Libedit is poor compared to readline, and the OS X installed version of libedit was, for years, hideously broken such that tab completion would cause SEGVs. It might have been fixed in the latest releases, or it might not. It's worth avoiding anyway.

I don't necessarily agree with Steve's other gripes about OSX, but I've
got to support this one. libedit has been badly, and differently,
broken in each of the past several major releases of OSX (there are some
details in our archives). It's brutally obvious that Apple doesn't test
it much, nor do they bother to fix it in minor releases. Get GNU
readline and build psql with that, if you're going to be using psql at
all heavily. And note that /usr/lib/libreadline.dylib is not GNU
readline, it's an alias for libedit.

regards, tom lane

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On 1/28/2013 11:15 AM, Steve Atkins wrote:

You're not planning on using this in production, I hope? OS X is a very solid desktop OS, but it's server variant is packed full of weird and plain broken behaviour.

Ouch. These are the servers they have and use, I don't really get a say
in that.

Are these problems PostgreSQL-specific? They are already running Apache
with PHP and MySQL on these, so if it is a general "broken-ness" I guess
they are already used to it?

-- Stephen

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On Jan 28, 2013, at 8:47 AM, Stephen Cook <sclists@gmail.com> wrote:

On 1/28/2013 11:15 AM, Steve Atkins wrote:

You're not planning on using this in production, I hope? OS X is a very solid desktop OS, but it's server variant is packed full of weird and plain broken behaviour.

Ouch. These are the servers they have and use, I don't really get a say in that.

Are these problems PostgreSQL-specific? They are already running Apache with PHP and MySQL on these, so if it is a general "broken-ness" I guess they are already used to it?

Not postgresql specific at all, just a lot of very flaky user-space code (and it's really just regular desktop OS X with more applications added, not really a differently tuned system). You're also going to find that it's really poorly suited for remote management via ssh, and the remote management apps have ridiculous OS version requirements for the management console. Plan on setting up VNC or using screen sharing (which is available on OS X client, /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app, or something like that).

If they're already using them in production with apache/php, nothing they're doing should break when they switch to postgresql.

Cheers,
Steve

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I have installed and configured PostgreSQL on Windows, FreeBSD, and a
few Linux flavors, but never OSX. I have the basic directions
(http://www.enterprisedb.com/resources-community/pginst-guide) and
found a couple of articles / blogs, but really I'm not an Apple guy
so I don't want to miss anything or screw anything up.

Is there anything I should watch out for? I have some wiggle room
(this is a development server at first), but I'd rather not break
anything.

I would stay away from MacPorts.

The last time I have been working with PostgreSQL on MacOS X, I used
the installer from

http://www.postgresqlformac.com/

There's also a different approach, that I've never tried:

http://postgresapp.com/

Sincerely,

Wolfgang

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Le 2013-01-28 à 14:47, Wolfgang Keller a écrit :

I have installed and configured PostgreSQL on Windows, FreeBSD, and a
few Linux flavors, but never OSX. I have the basic directions
(http://www.enterprisedb.com/resources-community/pginst-guide) and
found a couple of articles / blogs, but really I'm not an Apple guy
so I don't want to miss anything or screw anything up.

Is there anything I should watch out for? I have some wiggle room
(this is a development server at first), but I'd rather not break
anything.

I would stay away from MacPorts.

The last time I have been working with PostgreSQL on MacOS X, I used
the installer from

http://www.postgresqlformac.com/

There's also a different approach, that I've never tried:

http://postgresapp.com/

If you don't know about Homebrew, you should definitely look into it: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

That's what I use for development, and it works great.

Bye,
François

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On 1/28/13 1:05 PM, François Beausoleil wrote:

I would stay away from MacPorts.

Gotta agree on that one.

The last time I have been working with PostgreSQL on MacOS X, I used
the installer from

http://www.postgresqlformac.com/

There's also a different approach, that I've never tried:

http://postgresapp.com/

If you don't know about Homebrew, you should definitely look into it: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

I'll second that too. If you have problems with readline compilation error ( chances are good that
you will ), A homebrew replacement for the crappy OS X libraries might go along the lines of..

sudo git clone git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git /usr/local/homebrew
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s /usr/local/homebrew/bin/brew brew

sudo mkdir /usr/local/homebrew/Cellar
chmod a+w /usr/local/homebrew/Cellar
brew install readline
brew link --overwrite --dry-run readline
sudo brew link --overwrite readline

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