This project provides a sandbox installer for PostgreSQL. It can be used to download, compile, and install multiple PostgreSQL versions in parallel on a single system. All PostgreSQL installations are compiled with different configurations (RELEASE, DEBUG, and SANITIZER). The RELEASE build is an optimized PostgreSQL like the build that is provided by Linux Distributions, DEBUG is an unoptimized build that contains debug symbols. SANITIZER is a build that is compiled and statically linked against an address sanitizer (libasan) and a leak analyzer (liblsan).
For example, such a collection of local PostgreSQL installations is helpful if you develop PostgreSQL extensions and you have to test them on different versions (e.g., 12, 13, 14, and 15).
Install the PostgreSQL sandbox by executing the following commands:
git clone [email protected]:jnidzwetzki/postgresql-sandbox.git
Create a src directory inside of the downloaded sandbox to indicate that this directory should be used as the sandbox directory:
cd postgresql-sandbox
mkdir src
Adjust the VERSIONS setting inside of the script. This contains the PostgreSQL installations that should be installed. For example, if you set the variable to VERSIONS="REL_12_10 REL_13_6 REL_14_2 REL_15_1 REL_14_STABLE" PostgreSQL 12.10, 14.2, 15.1 and the latest 14 PostgreSQL versions are installed. These strings are the branches and tags of the PostgreSQL git repository.
Afterward, the PostgreSQL installations can be downloaded and installed by executing:
./postgres-sandbox.sh postgres_install
In addition, the initdb binary is invoked for each of the installations.
Note: Only new PostgreSQL installations are downloaded by this command. Only new versions are handled, and the remaining installations stay untouched. So, you can add further PostgreSQL versions to the VERSIONS setting and re-run the command.
After the command is complete, the src folder contains the sources of all of these PostgreSQL installations:
jan@debian11-work:~/postgresql-sandbox$ ls -l src/
total 64
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Apr 1 2022 postgres.git
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Oct 31 12:33 REL_12_10_DEBUG
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Oct 31 12:37 REL_12_10_RELEASE
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Dec 8 08:32 REL_12_10_SANITIZE
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Oct 31 12:20 REL_13_6_DEBUG
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Oct 31 12:23 REL_13_6_RELEASE
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Dec 7 11:16 REL_14_2_DEBUG
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Oct 31 12:17 REL_14_2_RELEASE
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Dec 7 16:04 REL_14_2_SANITIZE
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Dec 10 13:47 REL_15_1_DEBUG
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Nov 17 09:53 REL_15_1_RELEASE
drwxr-xr-x 7 jan jan 4096 Dec 10 13:51 REL_15_1_SANITIZE
The bin folder contains the binaries of these PostgreSQL installations and in data folder are the databases located.
To start a PostgreSQL installation, the command postgres_start together with the PostgreSQL installation name can be used. The following command starts the debug build of the PostgreSQL 15.1 installation.
~/postgresql-sandbox/postgres-sandbox.sh postgres_start REL_15_1_DEBUG
To stop the PostgreSQL installation, the postgres_stop command has to be used:
~/postgresql-sandbox/postgres-sandbox.sh postgres_stop REL_15_1_DEBUG
To get the PostgreSQL binaries (e.g., initdb or psql) into the path of the current shell, the path variable has to be adjusted. The following command adds the binaries of the PostgreSQL 14.2 release build to the path:
export PATH=~/postgresql-sandbox/bin/REL_14_2_RELEASE/bin:$PATH
To create a database and connect to the PostgreSQL server, the following commands can be used:
createdb mydb
psql mydb