15.5. Post-Installation Setup

15.5.1. Shared Libraries

On some systems with shared libraries you need to tell the system how to find the newly installed shared libraries. However, Linux does not need this.

The method to set the shared library search path varies between platforms, but the most widely-used 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://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_/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 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.

Because you are Linux, you have root access and you can run:

/sbin/ldconfig /usr/local/pgsql/lib

15.5.2. Environment Variables

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 Postgres-XC 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 all users):

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 lines 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.

When, as typical case, you're configuring both coordinator and datanode in a same server, please be careful not to assign same resource, such as listening point (IP address and port number) to different component. If you apply single set of environment described here to different components, they will conflict and Postgres-XC will not run correctly.