Relocatable PostgreSQL Builds

May 21, 2016

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PostgreSQL used to feel somewhat mysterious to me. It tends to live reclusively in an obscure system directory discoverable through programs like pg_config. Finding the data and log directories for your actual db requires connecting and asking, psql -c 'show data_directory;'. The daemon runs as another user, and the whole thing is kind of involved. Is there a simpler way, a way to treat Postgres as a regular program that you can run without sudo? The answer is definitely yes.

All you need to do is compile Postgres to be relocatable, and initialize a database in a place of your choosing. The program can be run as a regular user right out of the home directory. The following is adapted from scripts by Brian Cloutier and shows how to compile Postgres from source in Linux and OS X and adjust its binaries to run from any directory.

Building

Building for OS X

First we’ll build a plain Postgres version.

cd /tmp
mkdir pg-build

# Newest downloads at http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/

wget https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v9.5.3/postgresql-9.5.3.tar.bz2
bunzip2 postgresql-9.5.3.tar.bz2
tar xf postgresql-9.5.3.tar
cd postgresql-9.5.3

# Requires xcode to build.
# You may also want options such as:
# --with-openssl --with-libs=/usr/local/Cellar/readline/6.3.8/lib
./configure --prefix=/tmp/pg-build
make
make install

Next alter the binaries to use a relative path to libpq.

find /tmp/pg-build/bin -type f | \
  xargs -L 1 install_name_tool -change \
  /tmp/pg-build/lib/libpq.5.dylib \
  '@executable_path/../lib/libpq.5.dylib'

Building for Linux

Once again we start with building the basic binaries.

# I tried this on Ubuntu 16.04 and the resulting binaries work on
# many Linux distros but not old ones like CentOS 6

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev bison flex

cd /tmp
mkdir pg-build
wget https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v9.5.3/postgresql-9.5.3.tar.bz2
bunzip2 postgresql-9.5.3.tar.bz2
tar xf postgresql-9.5.3.tar
cd postgresql-9.5.3
# You may also want options such as --with-openssl
./configure --prefix=/tmp/pg-build --disable-rpath

# Rather than alter binaries after the fact, we build them referencing
# relative paths to libpq

export LD_RUN_PATH='$ORIGIN/../lib'
make
make install

Running without sudo, using local db

The previous steps provide builds in /tmp/pg-build, hence binaries in /tmp/pg-build/bin. You can copy and rename the pg-build directory wherever you want, for instance

cd $HOME
cp -R /tmp/pg-build pg
mkdir data
./pg/bin/initdb data
./pg/bin/pg_ctl -D data start

Now you’ll have a Postgres instance running as your user and saving information to a directory in your home directory, no sudo necessary. Pretty simple, and nice to see it’s a relocatable program like many others. You can configure this instance by editing the configuration files inside the data directory.

begriffs