PostgreSQL Installation – Postgres 9.4.1 on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS Fails to Install

postgresqlUbuntu

I'm trying to install PostgreSQL 9.4.1 on Ubuntu 14.04.2. I'm using the packages from apt.postgresql.org.

The package installs but it fails running pg_createcluster. If I run manually, I get:

Creating new cluster 9.4/main... config /etc/postgresql/9.4/main data /var/lib/postgresql/9.4/main locale en_US.UTF-8 Flags of /var/lib/postgresql/9.4/main set as --------------e-C Error: initdb failed

I can't find any details as to why initdb fails.

If I manually run initdb as the postgres user, that works, but that does not create the config files.

I checked everything I could think of, including on-line and can't find a solution.

Best Answer

Not an elegant solution but after installing the package using apt-get (which fails creating the cluster but installs PostgreSQL), I switched to the postgres user and created the database using initdb. Then back to root, I created the cluster using the pg_createcluster command.

This moved the configurations to /etc/postgres/9.4/main and set it all up.

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PostgreSQL – How to Get pg_archivecleanup on Amazon Linux 2014.03

With the help of this AWS forum thread, I realized that this line in /etc/yum.conf

exclude=postgresql*

excludes not only updates but installs. Once I commented that out (temporarily), I was able to use

sudo yum install postgresql-contrib

to install postgresql-contrib directly from the Amazon repo--no need for changing the repository or the operating system.

Postgresql – Error: /var/lib/postgresql/9.3/main is not accessible or does not exist

If you suspect there's something wrong with our database (cluster), make a copy of your database directory before you continue. Just to be sure. On Ubuntu the default directory would be: /var/lib/postgresql/9.3/main/ - but your installation may differ.

Actually, your command should work (in default Ubuntu installations), because the service command starts the postgres server process with appropriate privileges (as system user postgres)

sudo service postgresql start

Translates to something like:

sudo -u postgres /usr/lib/postgresql/9.3/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgresql/9.3/main/ -o "-c config_file=/etc/postgresql/9.3/main/postgresql.conf" start

That starts all db clusters you may have. To start a particular one, use the wrapper pg_ctlcluster:

sudo -u postgres pg_ctlcluster 9.3 main start

To get the status of all currently installed db clusters use pg_lsclusters:

sudo -u postgres pg_lsclusters

You must be aware that the data directory is not the same as the config directory in default Debian or Ubuntu Postgres installations. For Postgres 9.3 that would be:

data dir: /var/lib/postgresql/9.3/main/
config dir: /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/

You can check the /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/postgrsql.conf for the actual data dir. It's the line starting with

data_directory =

The error message indicates that Postgres tries to start with the default data dir, but it is not there or the privileges have been changed. Did you check?

Or are you running a non-default installation?

Best Answer

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