Note: This is a post from several months ago in the ol’ drafts bin and there’s a ton of information here, even though it is incomplete. I’m not running Fedora any more, but it’s possible this could help someone else, so I hit publish.

This shouldn’t be too long a post, but I’ve encountered something that does not really feel like it ought to be an edge case!

In trying to install PostgreSQL on Fedora 23 I ran into a few snags per the Other Linux Installation book published here using the download guide for RH-flavored Linuxes here.

Sidebar: In the Installation section of the introduction to Postgres (I know PG pretty well in the context of Puppet Enterprise, but I really want to expand that knowledge since I know a lot of people use & love it [/diatribe on why I’m doing this]) it says the following:

If you are installing PostgreSQL yourself, then refer to Chapter 15 for instructions on installation, and return to this guide when the installation is complete. Be sure to follow closely the section about setting up the appropriate environment variables.

That’s in section 1.1, on the Installation page, by the way. This might be why we can’t have nice things.

MOVING ALONG, the way which has worked for me to install Postgres is the following, thanks in much part to a) This Fedora Project doc and b) working knowledge of the su command.

$ sudo dnf install postgresql-server postgresql-contrib
 ... "are you sure you want to install y/N" ...

$ sudo systemctl enable postgresql
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/postgresql.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service.

$ sudo postgresql-setup initdb
WARNING: using obsoleted argument syntax, try --help
WARNING: arguments transformed to: postgresql-setup --initdb --unit postgresql
 * Initializing database in '/var/lib/pgsql/data'
 * Initialized, logs are in /var/lib/pgsql/initdb_postgresql.log

$ sudo systemctl start postgresql

So, only after making the dummy initdb did the systemctl start command go through, but I noticed that there was still no pgsql executable, so I couldn’t actually use postgres yet. Finally, I catted the postgres log like so:

$ sudo cat /var/lib/pgsql/initdb_postgresql.log
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale "en_US.UTF-8".
The default database encoding has accordingly been set to "UTF8".
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

Data page checksums are disabled.

fixing permissions on existing directory /var/lib/pgsql/data ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 100
selecting default shared_buffers ... 128MB
selecting dynamic shared memory implementation ... posix
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /var/lib/pgsql/data/base/1 ... ok
initializing pg_authid ... ok
initializing dependencies ... ok
creating system views ... ok
loading system objects' descriptions ... ok
creating collations ... ok
creating conversions ... ok
creating dictionaries ... ok
setting privileges on built-in objects ... ok
creating information schema ... ok
loading PL/pgSQL server-side language ... ok
vacuuming database template1 ... ok
copying template1 to template0 ... ok
copying template1 to postgres ... ok
syncing data to disk ... ok

Success. You can now start the database server using:

    /usr/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/pgsql/data
or
    /usr/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/lib/pgsql/data -l logfile start

which, up at the top, points out that that this needs to be run with the postgres user, and after some fiddling, knowing that the -D flag needs to be before the /var/lib/pgsql/data path as designation. Also seeing su crap itself a number of times was irritating. To get into the postgres user, it was necessary to provide a password! I hadn’t set one, so I tried a couple easy guesses & couldn’t figure it out and a (very quick) DDG didn’t yield anything either, so I snuck around it with sudo -u postgres psql, which only asked me for the superuser password – A-OK! But Then! It then complained that it didn’t have permissions to get into ~, but reasonably got me into the postgres user’s prompt: HERE, FINALLY, I was able to run

postgres=# /usr/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/pgsql/data

Though… now I’m noticing that anything I type in there doesn’t even throw an error. It even offers ‘Type “help” for help,’ and yet when I do, with and without quotes, there is no output & no result. And I still don’t have a pgsql executable.

Ok, but there IS a result from which postgres, which is the nicely predictable /usr/bin/postgres. One success – I have a universally executable postgres! So when I run it with no arguments, hoping for more information from my sleuthing, I get some!

 $ postgres
postgres does not know where to find the server configuration file.
You must specify the --config-file or -D invocation option or set the PGDATA environment variable.

So that’s where the -D is necessary. Cool. But we also definitely don’t have the PGDATA env var
postgres -D /var/lib/pgsql/data.

Wow! There’s more to do here, and I don’t have time right now, so have SOME information, yet incomplete!