How To Install PostgreSQL 9.6 on Ubuntu 20.04
Posted on July 1, 2021 • 6 min read • 1,272 wordsIn this tutorial, we learn how to install PostgreSQL 9.6 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
In this tutorial, we learn how to install PostgreSQL 9.6 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
PostgreSQL, or usually called Postgres, is an open-source object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) with an emphasis on extensibility and standards compliance.
PostgreSQL is ACID-compliant and transactional. It is developed by PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) that consists of many companies and individual contributors. PostgreSQL released under the terms of PostgreSQL license.
PostgreSQL 9.6 was released on 29 September 2016. Major enhancements in PostgreSQL 9.6 includes:
This tutorial assume you already satisfy the following requirements:
sudo
privileges (recommended) or a root user access. If you’re using root
user remove sudo
from each command on this tutorial.Since this is a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 20.04, before we install PostgreSQL 9.6, let’s update our system to the latest update.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade
After we upgrade our base system, now it’s time to install PostgreSQL 9.6.
Since Ubuntu 20.04 doesn’t have PostgreSQL 9.6 in its repository, we need to add oficial PostgreSQL repository so we can install PostgreSQL 9.6.
The PostgreSQL team is using GPG to sign downloadable packages from the PostgreSQL website.
We add PostgreSQL public GPG key so apt can verify that packages downloaded from PostgreSQL repository are not tampered or corrupt.
Add PostgreSQL GPG public key using the command below.
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
You should get OK
output for command above.
If you got the different output, you need to fix the error first before continue to the next step.
After adding PostgreSQL release keys, we create a new repository configuration for PostgreSQL using the command below.
echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/postgresql-pgdg.list > /dev/null
Refresh apt metadata using the command below.
sudo apt-get update
We’re ready to install PostgreSQL 9.6. Use the command below to install PostgreSQL 9.6 on Ubuntu 20.04.
sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.6
Only 4 steps needed to install PostgreSQL 9.6 on Ubuntu 20.04. We learn how to check and verify and managing PostgreSQL 9.6 installation in the next few sections.
We can check PostgreSQL 9.6 packages that already installed using the command below.
dpkg -l | grep postgresql
By default, PostgreSQL listens on port 5432. We can use netstat to check whether there is a process listening on port 5432.
sudo netstat -naptu | grep 5432
Another method is to check whether there is a process named postgres
listening on a port.
sudo netstat -naptu | grep postgres
Alternative to netstat
, We can use ss
command below to check whether there is a process listen on PostgreSQL default port 5432.
sudo ss -atnp | grep 5432
We can also use ss
to check whether there is a process named postgres
listening on a port.
sudo ss -atp | grep postgres
The last output above shows there is also a connection to ephemeral UDP port from local. According to this thread on PostgreSQL mailing lists, this is PostgreSQL stats collector that use UDP to send and receive stats data locally.
We can ue ps
command to check what processes currently running with name contain postgres.
ps -aux | grep postgres
Check PostgreSQL 9.6 resource usage like CPU and memory usingtop
command.
top -u postgres
Check postgres
service status using command below.
sudo service postgresql status
We can also use systemctl
command to check PostgreSQL service status.
sudo systemctl status postgresql
Using both commands above you see active (exited)
on the Active:
line. This happens because systemd doesn’t know the status of each PostgreSQL cluster running on the instance. One instance / installation of PostgreSQL can run mutliple clusters od PostgreSQL.
We can check, list of PostgreSQL clusters running on our machine using the command below.
pg_lsclusters
There is one cluster running on our machine. The cluster named main
running PostgreSQL 9.6. To check this cluster service status, we can use the command below.
sudo service [email protected] status
As an alternative to service, we can use systemctl to check this cluster status.
sudo systemctl status [email protected]
Stop PostgreSQL service using the command below.
sudo systemctl stop postgresql
Start PostgreSQL service using the command below.
sudo systemctl start postgresql
Restart PostgreSQL service using the command below.
sudo systemctl restart postgresql
Reload PostgreSQL service using the command below.
sudo systemctl reload postgresql
Now let’s connect to the PostgreSQL 9.6 server using psql
client application.
By default, postgres create system user named postgres
. There is also role in postgresql database named postgres
wth superuser permission.
Switch to postgresql
user.
sudo su - postgres
After switching to postgres user, we can connect using psql
command.
To list all databases in PostgreSQL we can use \l
command.
To list all users in PostgreSQL we can use \du
command.
To exit from psql
we can use \q
command.
To exit from postgres
user type exit
or CTRL+D
Now we’re on our own linux user. Let’s try to login to localhost
or 127.0.0.1
.
$ psql -U postgres -W -h 127.0.0.1
Password for user postgres:
It prompts for a password. Since we haven’t set any password, let’s leave it empty. We get the error message below.
psql: fe_sendauth: no password supplied
Since we cannot login without providing password, we set new password for postgres
user. Change user to postgres
user like shown above and use psql to connect to PostreSQL.
After logging in, type \password
. Enter new password and confirmation password for user postgres
.
When we login again to localhost
or 127.0.0.1
and provide a password, we can log in successfully.
In this section, we learn how to uninstall PostgreSQL 9.6 and its dependencies on Ubuntu 20.04 completely.
Please be careful when running steps in this section since this will stop your PostgreSQL database server.
You can use the command below to uninstall all PostgreSQL 9.6 packages, both server, and client.
sudo apt-get remove postgresql-9.6 \
postgresql-client-9.6 \
postgresql-client-common \
postgresql-common
Remove the PostgreSQL data directory using the command below.
rm -rf /var/lib/postgresql/
Remove PostgreSQL 9.6 configuration directories using the command below.
rm -rf /etc/postgresql
rm -rf /etc/postgresql-common
You can follow the links below to learn more about PostgreSQL 9.6 from PostgreSQL official documentation.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install PostgreSQL 9.6 on ubuntu 20.04. We also learn managing PostgreSQL services, using tools like netstat
, ss
, ps
, and top
to check PostgreSQL service.
After that, we learn how to connect to PostgreSQL 9.6 server using psql client, changing postgres
superuser password, and in the end, we learn how to uninstall PostgreSQL 9.6. I hope this is useful for initiating your journey to PostgreSQL 9.6.