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As you might know the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is currently working on the final version of the PostgreSQL Database Management System (DBMS) 8.3 which has some nice features. Unfortunately, there is no prebuilt package available for Mac OS X of the current beta versions. But fortunately building PostgreSQL is very easy on Leopard:

Requirements

This short tutorial requires you to have Mac OS X Leopard (it also may work with Tiger) installed on your system along with the Xcode tools.

Getting the sources

The sources of PostgreSQL are free available from one of the mirrors listed here.Download the current beta from the source directory and unpack it.

Configuring

Before you can start the actual build process, you have to generate the Makefiles. This is done by running the included configure script with optional parameters.Available parameters can be listed with the following command:

$ ./configure --help

I decided to build my installation with the following parameters:

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/local/postgresql83b3 
                    --enable-thread-safety 
                    --without-docdir 
                    --with-perl 
                    --with-gssapi 
                    --with-pam 
                    --with-bonjour 
                    --with-openssl

There is no need to install 3rd party libraries when you use these parameters, but feel free to change them. For a full description of all the parameters have a look at this website. The configure script now does some checks and creates the Makefiles needed for the build process.

Building PostgreSQL

The actual build process is started by running the make command. The created Makefiles are used to tell the make program which files have to be compiled and how the whole application has to build together.

$ make

Depending on your machine the build process takes a few minutes. If make succeeds you should see this line:

All of PostgreSQL successfully made. Ready to install.

Great!

Installing PostgreSQL

The install process is as easy as the build process. The only thing we do is telling make to start the installation:

$ make install

A few seconds later you should see this:

PostgreSQL installation complete.

Creating the database cluster

Before we can use PostgreSQL we have to create at least one database cluster. That is the location where all the data will be stored (here in the directory data).

$ cd /opt/local/postgresql83b3
$ bin/initdb ./data

Starting the server process

Starting the PostgreSQL server process is done via the pg_ctl program located in the bin directory.

$ bin/pg_ctl -D ./data start

To stop it, use

$ bin/pg_ctl -D ./data stop

Using launchd to start automatically

If you plan to use PostgreSQL frequently you might be interested in starting PostgreSQL automatically when you log into your system. To do this, download this file and copy it into ~/Library/LaunchAgents (you may create the LaunchAgents directory if it doesn’t already exist). Next time you log in, the PostgreSQL server process is started automatically. The file expects to find your PostgreSQL installation in /opt/local/postgresql83b3. Feel free to change it, if you installed it somewhere else.

Connecting to the database

To test if your installation is actually working you can use psql to make a local connection to your server. Please note, that PostgreSQL doesn’t allow any network connections using the default configuration. Have a look at the manual for further information.

$ cd /opt/local/postgresql83b3$ bin/psql -d postgres
Welcome to psql 8.3beta3, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Congratulations

The purpose of this little tutorial is to show you how source packages can be compiled on Mac OS X (and other Unices). This way of building applications (configure/make/make install) is a common way in the Unix world and you’ll come across these tools very often if you build applications from source packages.