Postgres on OS X 10.4

Yesterday we received our shiny new MacBook Pro laptops. So I've been spending a lot of time installing everything needed to make it the awesome development machine it should be! After wasting a lot of time getting Firefox running properly (after reinstalling it about 10 times the problem turned out to be with Google Toolbar - the problem only manifested itself after the second restart of Firefox which made it hard to pinpoint the problem) the biggest hurdle has been Postgres.

I used developer.apple.com's PostgreSQL on Mac OS X instructions as a base, but because of our NTLM proxy, and the fact the the MacBooks are brand new, there were a few extra steps that needed to be made. The full sequence is listed below for posterity:

Install ntlmaps
The NAA uses an NTLM-based authenticating proxy, which cannot be used by software package managers such as fink and apt. To get around this, download the source for a python program called ntlmaps from its sourceforge downloads page. Unpack the contents and copy the whole directory to the mac's Applications folder. In the main ntlmaps directory, edit the server.cfg file to suit your proxy (I needed to edit the parent proxy address, parent proxy port, domain name, username and password fields. Yes, unfortunately the password is stored in this file in plaintext - if you don't mind starting up ntlmaps manually each time you can leave the password field blank and ntlmaps will request the password when you start it). Finally, run the main.py script to start the ntlmaps proxy.

Install Fink
Fink is a package management system for OS X, based on apt. It's the easiest way to install postgres as it means postgres doesn't have to be built from source! Follow the instructions on the fink download page to install fink.

Set the http_proxy environment variable
Apt needs to know about the ntlmaps proxy. In your system-wide configuration file, add the following lines:

http_proxy="http://localhost:5865"
export http_proxy

To find the system-wide configuration file that the mac was using, I referenced Configuring Your OS X Unix Environment and found that I was using the bash shell, and so I added the above lines to the /etc/profile file.

Install Postgres using apt
Firstly, update the apt cache of packages by executing the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Next we need to find the correct package to install. Use the following command to search for postgres packages:

sudo apt-cache search postgres

Install the most up-to-date package in the returned list of packages. For me, it's postgresql80. The package is installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get install postgresql80

Follow the prompts, and postgres is installed!

Setup root user
The postgres user is created during the postgres installation, however the user is not informed as to its password... which is needed to do just about anything useful with postgres. To set the postgres user's password, we need to be root. However the powerbook does not initially have a root password set so we need to change this first. Use the command:

su passwd root

and follow the prompts to change the root password.

Change password for postgres
Use the following commands to change the password for the postgres user:

su
passwd postgres

Create pgsql data dir
Create a directory in which the database tables will live. I chose /usr/local/pgsql/data. Run the following commands to create the directory and give ownership of it to the postgres user:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data
sudo chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data

Fix the postgres user
The postgres user created by the postgres install process is not set up correctly - its home and shell properties are set to null. To fix this, run NetInfo Manager (I used spotlight to find it), click on "users" and then "postgres", and change the "home" property to /Users/postgres, and change the "shell" property to /bin/bash.

Increase shared memory
The first time I tried to run the initdb command I got an error saying that there was not enough shared memory to run that command. It's probably because I had eclipse open at the time, but I decided it was probably a good idea to increase it anyway. To increase shared memory, edit (or create if it doesn't exist) the /etc/sysctl.conf file so that it contains:

kern.sysv.shmmax=16777216
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=128
kern.sysv.shmseg=32
kern.sysv.shmall=4096

This will increase the shared memory from the default 0f 4MB to 16MB.

Run initdb
Run the following command to initialise the database:

initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

Start postgres
Now we're ready to start postgres! Run the following command:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgsql/data -l logfile start

And we're done! It's that easy!