Introduction

This is a quick post on how to install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu.

Parts of this document are copied from the official PostgreSQL documentation at https://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/ for my own reference.

Repository configuration

At the time of writing, the PostgreSQL Apt repository supports the following Ubuntu LTS versions:

It is possible to configure the apt repository either automatically or manually. We’ll use the scripts from the GitHub repository iac-scripts from CoreLayer, which combines the manual configuration steps in a simple shell script.

GitHub Repository

git clone https://github.com/corelayer/iac-scripts /tmp/iac-scripts
sudo sh /tmp/iac-scripts/linux/software/postgresql/apt-configure.sh

Automatic configuration

sudo apt install -u postgresql-common
sudo /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.sh

Manual configuration

sudo apt install curl ca-certificates
sudo install -d /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg
sudo curl -o /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.asc --fail https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.asc] https://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install postgresql

Server installation

PostgreSQL 16

To install the core database server, we can use the script apt-install_postgresql-16.sh from the same repository:

sudo sh /tmp/iac-scripts/linux/software/postgresql/apt-install_postgresql-16.sh

Server configuration

The installation command run in the step above, will install and configure PostgreSQL to run on a specific user postgres with the correct privileges on Ubuntu.

However, additional steps need to be taken to configure the server. The configuration file is located in /etc/postgresql/$version/main/postgresql.conf.

Listen address

By default, PostgreSQL listens on localhost only, port tcp/5432. First of all, we’ll change that into the IP address of our server.

sudo sh /tmp/iac-scripts/linux/software/postgresql/configure/listenaddress.sh $version $ipaddress