On some systems that have shared libraries (which most systems do)
you need to tell your system how to find the newly installed
shared libraries. The systems on which this is
not necessary include BSD/OS, FreeBSD,
HP-UX, IRIX, Linux,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64
UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX), and
Solaris.
The method to set the shared library search path varies between
platforms, but the most widely usable method is to set the
environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH like so: In Bourne
shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh)
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or in csh or tcsh
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/pgsql/lib
Replace /usr/local/pgsql/lib with whatever you set
--libdir to in step 1.
You should put these commands into a shell start-up file such as
/etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile. Some
good information about the caveats associated with this method can
be found at http://www.visi.com/~barr/ldpath.html.
On some systems it might be preferable to set the environment
variable LD_RUN_PATH before
building.
On Cygwin, put the library
directory in the PATH or move the
.dll files into the bin/
directory.
If in doubt, refer to the manual pages of your system (perhaps
ld.so or rld). If you later
on get a message like
psql: error in loading shared libraries
libpq.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
then this step was necessary. Simply take care of it then.
If you are on BSD/OS, Linux, or SunOS 4
and you have root access you can run
/sbin/ldconfig /usr/local/pgsql/lib
(or equivalent directory) after installation to enable the
run-time linker to find the shared libraries faster. Refer to the
manual page of ldconfig for more information. On
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD the command is
/sbin/ldconfig -m /usr/local/pgsql/lib
instead. Other systems are not known to have an equivalent
command.
If you installed into /usr/local/pgsql or some other
location that is not searched for programs by default, you should
add /usr/local/pgsql/bin (or whatever you set
--bindir to in step 1)
into your PATH. Strictly speaking, this is not
necessary, but it will make the use of PostgreSQL
much more convenient.
To do this, add the following to your shell start-up file, such as
~/.bash_profile (or /etc/profile, if you
want it to affect every user):
PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/bin:$PATH
export PATH
If you are using csh or tcsh, then use this command:
set path = ( /usr/local/pgsql/bin $path )
To enable your system to find the man
documentation, you need to add a line like the following to a
shell start-up file unless you installed into a location that is
searched by default.
MANPATH=/usr/local/pgsql/man:$MANPATH
export MANPATH
The environment variables PGHOST and PGPORT
specify to client applications the host and port of the database
server, overriding the compiled-in defaults. If you are going to
run client applications remotely then it is convenient if every
user that plans to use the database sets PGHOST. This
is not required, however: the settings can be communicated via command
line options to most client programs.
