README.rpm-dist ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version 6.0, for the PostgreSQL 7.4-0.1PGDG RPMset. Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: 0.) Quick -i note. 1.) Introduction, QuickStart, and credits 2.) PostgreSQL RPM packages and rationale 3.) Starting multiple postmasters 4.) Regression Testing 5.) Starting postmaster automatically on startup 6.) Grand Unified Configuration(GUC) File. 7.) Rebuilding the source RPM. 8.) Contrib files. 9.) Logging set up 10.) Further Information Resource QUICK '-i' NOTE ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The postmaster '-i' option is NOT used by default in the initscript shipped with these RPMs. Please do NOT modify the initscript to add the '-i' back in -- it will get overwritten on the next package upgrade. Rather, see the section below on the Grand Unified Configuration file, which includes the recommended way to get '-i' functionality back. INTRODUCTION ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This document exists to explain the layout of the RPM's for PostgreSQL,to describe various RPM specifics, and to document special features found in the RPMset. This document is written to be applicable to version 7.4 of PostgreSQL, which is the current version of the RPM's as of this writing. More to the point, versions prior to 7.3 are not documented here. Official PostgreSQL Global Development Group RPM's have from version 7.1.2 on carried a 'PGDG' after the release number. Other RPMset's as distributed with Linux distributions may have a different release number and initials. It is preferable for the distribution-specific set to be the one used, as the PGDG set is intentionally generic. So, if your distro has a set of RPMs, use them in preference. If you want to stay up-to-date on the PostgreSQL core itself, use the PGDG generic set -- but understand that it is a GENERIC set. These RPMs are designed to be LSB-compliant -- if you find this not to be the case, please let me know by way of the pgsql-ports@postgresql.org mailing list. These RPMs no longer support any sort of upgrading process other than that documented in the regular documentation. That is, you must dump, upgrade, initdb, and restore your data. The 7.2 to 7.3 migration can be quite difficult, even to the point of requiring hand-editing of the dumpfile. Thus, the 7.3 postgresql-server RPM specifically conflicted with prior versions. The old server subpackage must be removed first, the new package installed, and the data restored from dump. However, RPM itself did not honor this. A new method of running multiple versions of PostgreSQL, along with the capability to run multiple postmasters, is in development, but was not ready for this release. A new section on running multiple postmasters has replaced the old upgrade instructions. QUICKSTART ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For a fresh installation on a recent Red Hat or similar system, a simple service postgresql start as root will prepare a new database (initdb), and start a postmaster that will listen on Unix socket 5432 only. Edit /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf to enable TCP/IP -- see the section on '-i.' The file /var/lib/pgsql/.bash_profile is now packaged to help with the setting of environment variables. You may edit this file, and it won't be overwritten during an upgrade. However, enhancements and bugfixes may be added to this file, so be sure to check .bash_profile.rpmnew after upgrading. The user 'postgres' is created during installation of the server subpackage. This user by default is UID and GID 26. The user has the default shell set to bash, and the home directory set to /var/lib/pgsql. This user also has no default password -- in order to be able to su to from a non-root account or login as 'postgres' you will need to set a password using passwd. While PygreSQL was split out from the main tarball, thanks to Kaj's work it is still included as the python subpackage. CREDITS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thomas Lockhart Uncle George Ryan Kirkpatrick Trond Eivind Glomsrd Mark Knox Mike Mascari Nicolas Huillard Karl DeBisschop Roger Luethi Jeff Johnson Reinhard Max Peter Eisentraut Joe Conway Andrew Overholt David Jee Kaj J. Niemi POSTGRESQL RPM PACKAGES AND RATIONALE. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The RPMset is packaged in the following subpackages: postgresql: Some clients and libraries, and documentation postgresql-server: Server executables and data files postgresql-devel: Client-side development libraries postgresql-tcl: TCL/TK client libraries and docs postgresql-python: The PygreSQL client library postgresql-jdbc: JAR of the JDBC client postgresql-test: The regression tests and associated files. postgresql-tcl: Tcl client and PL ONLY. postgresql-libs: client shared libraries. postgresql-docs: extra documentation,such as the SGML doc sources. postgresql-contrib: The contrib source tree, as well as selected binaries. postgresql-pl: PL/Perl (if possible on this dist), PL/Python, and PL/Tcl Note that there is no postgresql-perl, postgresql-odbc, postgresql-tk, or postgresql-plperl package any longer. This is due to these portions being removed from the PostgreSQL source tarball. The TK client package 'pgaccess' was the core of the -tk subpackage -- so the pgtksh client was rolled back into the -tcl package. PostgreSQL is split up into multiple packages so that users can 'pick and choose' what pieces are needed, and what dependencies are required. RPM FILE LOCATIONS. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- In compliance with the Linux FHS, the PostgreSQL RPM's install files in a manner not consistent with most of the PostgreSQL documentation. According to the standard PostgreSQL documentation, PostgreSQL is installed under the directory /usr/local/pgsql, with executables, source, and data existing in various subdirectories. Different distributions have different ideas of some of these file locations. In particular, the documentation directory can be /usr/doc, /usr/doc/packages, /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/doc/packages, or some other similar path. The RedHat 7 locations are listed below. On SuSE <7.1, substitute 'postgres' for 'postgresql' below, and 'pg_tk' for 'postgresql-tk' below. However, the RPM's install the files like this: Executables: /usr/bin Libaries: /usr/lib Documentation: /usr/share/doc/postgresql-x.y.z Contrib: /usr/share/doc/postgresql-x.y.z/contrib Source: not installed Data: /var/lib/pgsql/data Backup area: /var/lib/pgsql/backup Templates: /usr/share/pgsql Procedural Languages: /usr/lib/pgsql Development Headers: /usr/include/pgsql Other shared data: /usr/share/pgsql Regression tests: /usr/lib/pgsql/test/regress (in the -test package) Documentation SGML: /usr/share/doc/postgresql-docs-x.y.z The above list references the Red Hat 7.x structure. These locations may change for other distributions. Use of 'rpm -ql' for each package is recommended as the 'Official' location source. While it may seem gratuitous to place these files in different locations, the FHS requires it -- distributions should not ever touch /usr/local. It may also seem like more work to keep track of where everything is -- but, that's the beauty of RPM -- you don't have to keep track of the files, RPM does it for you. These RPM's are meant to be LSB-compliant. If you find errors in them that cause thembe be non-compliant, please let me know. MULTIPLE POSTMASTERS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The postgresql-server RPM contains an 'initscript' that is used to start the postmaster. The current version of this script has logic to be able to start multiple postmasters, with different data areas, listening on different ports, etc. To use this functionality requires root access. As an example, let us create a secondary postmaster called, creatively enough, 'secondary'. Here are the steps: 1.) create a hard link in /etc/rc.d/init.d (or equivalent location) to postgresql named 'secondary' : ln postgresql secondary Pick a name not already used in /etc/rc.d/init.d! 2.) create a file in /etc/sysconfig/pgsql named secondary. This file is a shell script -- typically you would define PGDATA, PGPORT, and PGOPTS here. Since $PGDATA/postgresql.conf will override many of these settings, except PGDATA, you might be surprised on startup. 3.) create the target PGDATA. 4.) Initdb the targe PGDATA as documented in the main documentation. Automatic initdb may or may not work for you, so a manual one is preferred. This must be done as user 'postgres' 5.) Edit postgresql.conf to change the port, address, tcpip settings, etc. 6.) Start the postmaster with 'service secondary start'. Note that there may be problems with the standard symlink -- consider this support experimental at this point in time. REGRESSION TESTING ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the features of the newer RPM sets is the capability to perform the regression tests. These tests stress your database installation and produce results that give you assurances that the installation is complete, and that your database machine is up to the task. To run the regression tests under the RPM installation, make sure that postmaster has been started (if not, su to root and execute the '/etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql start' init script), cd to /usr/lib/pgsql/test/regress, su to postgres, and execute the command line: time ./pg_regress.sh --schedule=parallel_schedule This command line will start the regression tests and will both show the results to the screen and store the results in the file regress.out. It will also give you a crude benchmark of how fast your machine performs. If tests fail, please see the file regression.diffs in that directory. If you need help interpreting that file, contact the pgsql-ports list on postgresql.org. There are some tests that will almost always fail with RedHat Linux 5.x and 6.x installations. The geometry, float8, and on occassion the random test will fail. These failures are normal for RedHat 5.2 and 6.1. For RedHat 6.1 with certain i18n settings, there will be other tests fail. For 7.1RC1, all 76 tests passed on RedHat 6.2 and RedHat 7.0. This was accomplished by fiddling with the locale settings. In version 7.1.2 this capability was removed -- you need to set your locale to 'C' before executing the first postmaster startup, or many more regression tests will fail. For interpretation of the regression tests, see the PostgreSQL documentation. STARTING POSTMASTER AUTOMATICALLY AT SYSTEM STARTUP ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RedHat Linux uses the System V Init package. A startup script for PostgreSQL is provided in the server package, as /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql. To start the postmaster, with sanity checking, as root, run service postgresql start to shut postmaster down, service postgresql stop There are other parameters to this script -- execute 'service postgresql' for a listing. To get this script to run at system startup or any time the system switches into runlevels 3, 4, or 5, run: chkconfig --add postgresql chkconfig --level 345 postgresql on and the proper symlinks will be created. Check the chkconfig man page for more information. Note that this is manual -- while the startup script can include tags to allow chkconfig to automatically perform the symlinking, this is not done at this time. SuSE has maintained their own RPMset for some time -- their documentation supercedes any found in this file. GRAND UNIFIED CONFIGURATION (GUC) FILE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The PostgreSQL server has many tunable parameters -- the file /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf is the master configuration file for the whole system. The RPM ships with the default file -- you will need to tune the parameters for your installation. In particular, you might want to allow TCP/IP socket connections -- in order to allow these, you will need to edit the postgresql.conf file. The line in question contains the string 'tcpip_socket' --want to both uncomment the line and set the parameter to true in order to get the TCP/IP socket to open. This is the same behavior the -i command line switch provides. It is preferable to use the postgresql.conf file, however, as future versions of the RPMset will allow multiple postmaster instances -- and that will only be possible thanks to the decoupling of settings out to each datadir. REBUILDING FROM SOURCE RPM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If your distribution is not supported by the binary RPM's from PostgreSQL.org, you will need to rebuild from the source RPM. Download the .src.rpm for this release. You will need to be root to rebuild, unless you have already set up a non-root build environment. Install the source RPM with rpm -i, then CD to the rpm building area (on RedHat this is /usr/src/redhat by default). You will have to have a full development environment to rebuild the full RPM set. This release of the RPMset includes the ability to conditionally build sets of packages. The parameters, their defaults, and the meanings are: build6x undef #don't build for Red Hat 6.x. Define it to cause # other options to be tailored to 6.x. beta 0 #build with cassert and do not strip the binaries perl 1 #build the postgresql-perl package. tcl 1 #build the postgresql-tcl package. tkpkg 1 #build the postgresql-tk package. jdbc 1 #build the postgresql-jdbc package. pls 1 #build the postgresql-pl package. test 1 #build the postgresql-test package. python 1 #build the postgresql-python package. pltcl 1 #build the pltcl portion of the postgresql-pl package. plperl 1 #build the plperl portion of the postgresql-pl package. ssl 1 #use OpenSSL support. kerberos 1 #use Kerberos 5 support. nls 1 #build with national language support. pam 1 #build with PAM support. To use these defines, invoke a rebuild like this: rpm --rebuild --define 'perl 0' --define 'tcl 0' --define 'tkpkg 0'\ --define 'test 0' --define 'newintarray 1' --define 'kerberos 0' \ postgresql-7.1.3-1PGDG.src.rpm This line would disable the perl, tcl, tk, and test subpackages, enable the newer intarray code, and disable kerberos support. More of these conditionals will be added in the future. CONTRIB FILES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The contents of the contrib tree are packaged into the -contrib subpackage and are processed with make and make install. There is documentation in /usr/share/doc/postgresql-contrib-VERSION for these modules. Most of the modules are in /usr/lib/pgsql for loadable modules, and binaries are in /usr/bin. In the future these files may be split out, depending upon function and dependencies. LOGGING SET UP ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To get rollable syslog set up, see the documentation for the file postgresql.conf, by default in the directory /var/lib/pgsql/data, as relates to the syslog options. Then, add a line to /etc/syslog.conf, using the man page for syslog.conf as a source. Example: If postgresql.conf has the following lines for the syslog settings: syslog = 1 # range 0-2 syslog_facility = 'LOCAL0' syslog_ident = 'postgres' Then you need to add the line to /etc/syslog.conf: local0.* /var/log/postgresql Then set up an entry in /etc/logrotate.d to roll postgresql the way you want it rolled. MORE INFORMATION ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can get more information at http://www.postgresql.org Please help make this packaging better -- let me know if you find problems, or better ways of doing things. You can reach me by e-mail at pgsql-ports@postgresql.org -- please include an [RPM] string in the subject, as I use automatic mail folder processing to put mail in the right place. SuSE information is available at SuSE's website and information contacts. A 7.4 SuSE RPM is available on ftp.postgresql.org. It is different from this RPM due to SuSE's different needs. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------