In general, a modern Unix-compatible platform should be able to run
PostgreSQL.
The platforms that had received specific testing at the
time of release are listed in Section 1.7
below. In the doc subdirectory of the distribution
there are several platform-specific FAQ documents you
might wish to consult if you are having trouble.
The following software packages are required for building
PostgreSQL:
GNUmake is required; other
make programs will not work.
GNUmake is often installed under
the name gmake; this document will always
refer to it by that name. (On some systems
GNU make is the default tool with the name
make.) To test for GNUmake enter
gmake --version
It is recommended to use version 3.76.1 or later.
You need an ISO/ANSI C compiler. Recent
versions of GCC are recommendable, but
PostgreSQL is known to build with a wide variety
of compilers from different vendors.
gzip is needed to unpack the distribution in the
first place. If you are reading this, you probably already got
past that hurdle.
The GNUReadline library (for
comfortable line editing and command history retrieval) will be
used by default. If you don't want to use it then you must
specify the --without-readline option for
configure. (On NetBSD,
the libedit library is
readline-compatible and is used if
libreadline is not found.)
To build on Windows NT or Windows
2000 you need the Cygwin and
cygipc packages. See the file
doc/FAQ_MSWIN for details.
The following packages are optional. They are not required in the
default configuration, but they are needed when certain build
options are enabled, as explained below.
To build the server programming language PL/Perl you need a full
Perl installation, including the
libperl library and the header files.
Since PL/Perl will be a shared library, the
libperl library must be a shared library
also on most platforms. This appears to be the default in
recent Perl versions, but it was not in earlier versions, and in
general it is the choice of whomever installed Perl at your
site.
If you don't have the shared library but you need one, a message
like this will appear during the build to point out this fact:
*** Cannot build PL/Perl because libperl is not a shared library.
*** You might have to rebuild your Perl installation. Refer to
*** the documentation for details.
(If you don't follow the on-screen output you will merely notice
that the PL/Perl library object, plperl.so
or similar, will not be installed.) If you see this, you will
have to rebuild and install Perl
manually to be able to build PL/Perl. During the configuration
process for Perl, request a shared
library.
To build the Python interface module or the PL/Python server
programming language, you need a Python installation, including
the header files.
Since PL/Python will be a shared library, the
libpython library must be a shared library
also on most platforms. This is not the case in a default
Python installation.
If after building and installing you have a file called
plpython.so (possibly a different
extension), then everything went well. Otherwise you should
have seen a notice like this flying by:
*** Cannot build PL/Python because libpython is not a shared library.
*** You might have to rebuild your Python installation. Refer to
*** the documentation for details.
That means you have to rebuild (part of) your Python
installation to supply this shared library.
The catch is that the Python distribution or the Python
maintainers do not provide any direct way to do this. The
closest thing we can offer you is the information in Python FAQ
3.30. On some operating systems you don't really have
to build a shared library, but then you will have to convince
the PostgreSQL build system of this. Consult
the Makefile in the
src/pl/plpython directory for details.
If you want to build Tcl or Tk components (clients and the
PL/Tcl language) you of course need a Tcl installation.
To build the JDBC driver, you need
Ant 1.5 or higher and a
JDK. Ant is a
special tool for building Java-based packages. It can be
downloaded from the Ant
web site.
If you have several Java compilers installed, it depends on the
Ant configuration which one gets used. Precompiled
Ant distributions are typically set
up to read a file .antrc in the current
user's home directory for configuration. For example, to use a
different JDK than the default, this may
work:
Note: Do not try to build the driver by calling
ant or even javac
directly. This will not work. Run gmake
normally as described below.
To enable Native Language Support (NLS), that
is, the ability to display a program's messages in a language
other than English, you need an implementation of the
GettextAPI. Some operating
systems have this built-in (e.g., Linux, NetBSD,
Solaris), for other systems you
can download an add-on package from here: http://www.postgresql.org/~petere/gettext.html.
If you are using the gettext implementation in
the GNU C library then you will additionally
need the GNU Gettext package for some
utility programs. For any of the other implementations you will
not need it.
Kerberos, OpenSSL, or PAM,
if you want to support
authentication using these services.
If you are build from a CVS tree instead of
using a released source package, or if you want to do development,
you also need the following packages:
Flex and Bison
are needed to build a CVS checkout or if you changed the actual
scanner and parser definition files. If you need them, be sure
to get Flex 2.5.4 or later and
Bison 1.50 or later. Other yacc
programs can sometimes be used, but doing so requires extra
effort and is not recommended. Other lex
programs will definitely not work.
Also check that you have sufficient disk space. You will need about
65 MB for the source tree during compilation and about 15 MB for
the installation directory. An empty database cluster takes about
25 MB, databases take about five times the amount of space that a
flat text file with the same data would take. If you are going to
run the regression tests you will temporarily need up to an extra
90 MB. Use the df command to check for disk
space.
