Hello, friends. Although MariaDB is one of the most important database drivers out there, many large projects prefer to use PostgreSQL. So, taking advantage that we have Debian 11, I will show you how to install PostgreSQL on this system.
For the PostgreSQL website and listening to many programmers, “PostgreSQL is The World’s Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database”.
This is due to its high reliability and the way it works with data. It is said that for really big projects, there is nothing like using PostgreSQL. Also, it includes tools like multi version and others that make it very powerful.
According to the official information that we can find on the web site
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance.
So, let’s go for it.
Install PostgreSQL on Debian 11
Debian, which is a multipurpose operating system, has many different tools in its official repositories. So it is not surprising that PostgreSQL is also present.
In addition to the base PostgreSQL package there are also others that we can use at other times. If you want to do a search in the repositories run
sudo apt update sudo apt search postgresql
And this way we will be able to see all these packages.
To install PostgreSQL on Debian 11, you have to run the following command
sudo apt install postgresql-13 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: git-man liberror-perl Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them. The following additional packages will be installed: libllvm11 libpq5 libxslt1.1 libz3-4 postgresql-client-13 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common ssl-cert Suggested packages: postgresql-doc-13 libjson-perl Recommended packages: sysstat The following NEW packages will be installed: libllvm11 libpq5 libxslt1.1 libz3-4 postgresql-13 postgresql-client-13 postgresql-client-common postgresql-common ssl-cert 0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 42.3 MB of archives. After this operation, 165 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
This will install the PostgreSQL base package which will be enough to do a job with it.
In Debian when installing an application that is managed through a systemd service, it will start automatically.
So, you can check the status of this service like this
sudo systemctl status postgresql ● postgresql.service - PostgreSQL RDBMS Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (exited) since Wed 2021-08-18 22:27:21 CEST; 4min 40s ago Main PID: 11736 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Tasks: 0 (limit: 2277) Memory: 0B CPU: 0 CGroup: /system.slice/postgresql.service
So PostgreSQL is working properly. If you want to stop, restart or start the service you can use these commands
sudo systemctl stop postgresql sudo systemctl restart postgresql sudo systemctl start postgresql
Now let’s connect to PostgreSQL
Test the PostgreSQL installation
Now it’s time to use some PostgreSQL. The console is called psql
but it is only available to the postgres
user that was created during the installation.
So, first switch to the postgres
user.
sudo -i -u postgres
And now if you access the console
psql
Inside it, you can execute commands. For example, list the databases:
\l
So, PostgreSQL is installed correctly and is working.
Enjoy it
Conclusion
In this post, you have learned how to install PostgreSQL in a quick and easy way that can help newbies get started with this powerful database manager.