Practical PostgreSQL

Preparing for Installation

The installation of PostgreSQL is not difficult. However, there are some software requirements that you will need for the PostgreSQL compilation. All of the requirements—outside of the PostgreSQL source code—are GNU tools. If you are running Linux, there is a good chance that the tools are already installed. If you are running a BSD derivative, such as FreeBSD or MacOS X, you may have to download the tools.

If you find that you are missing any of the required components, first check your vendor’s web site for the packages; otherwise, you may download them from http://www.gnu.org. It is also essential that you have enough disk space available to unpack and compile the source code on the filesystem to which you install. Disk-space requirements are discussed in the section titled Disk Space.

Required Software Packages

You will most likely have some of the required software packages already installed on your system, if not all of them. These packages are as follows:

GNU make

GNU make is commonly known as gmake on non-GNU based systems, but is normally referred to as just make on GNU-based systems such as Linux. For consistency, we will refer to it as gmake throughout the majority of this book.

We recommend that you use at least gmake version 3.76.1 or higher when compiling PostgreSQL. To verify the existence and correct version number of gmake, type the command shown in Example 2-1.

Example 2-1. Verifying GNU make

$ gmake --version GNU Make version 3.79.1, ...