⭐️ What is This!

This repo offers an AppImage for Postgresql, psql and other pg utilities.

You can download the AppImage from the dist/ folder in this repo:

• 💾 For Arm machines like Pi, M1, Graviton
• 💾 For x86 machines like Intel, AMD

🙋 Why?

I wanted a portable & quick way to run a postgres server as well as utility binaries such as psql, pg_dump.

Although it's fairly trivial to just run postgres via docker, docker isn't always available everywhere (for example within a docker container itself without DnD).

This project makes it incredibly simple to run postgres as a singular binary.

👩‍🏫 Examples

(note: swap aarch64 for x86_64 if you're on an intel/amd machine)

• running ./Postgres-12-aarch64.AppImage on its own will run a postgres server with default parameters. A username of username password of password and default database postgres.
• running ./Postgres-12-aarch64.AppImage --username bob --password abc123 --database myproject --path $HOME/mydbdata will run a database with the provided username, password and database name, and it will store that database in your home folder in the mydbdata folder.

⌨️ All Options

NONE of these are required, all of them have (I hope reasonable) defaults:

./Postgres-12-aarch64.AppImage \
  --port 5432 \                        # defaults to 5432
  --dataDir $HOME/pg/data \            # defaults to /tmp/postgresql-temp-db-XXXX
  --username aaa \                     # defaults to username
  --password bbb \                     # defaults to password
  --database ddd \                     # defaults to postgres
  --configFile /custom_config.file \   # defaults to none
  --socketDir /pg \                    # defaults to /tmp
  --pidFile /pg/pg.pid \               # defaults to /tmp/postgresql-pidfile-XXXX"
  --logFile /pg/pg.log \               # defaults to /tmp/postgresql-logs-XXXX
  ---hbaFile /pg/custom_hba_file \     # defaults to a file in /tmp that allows ALL local access and remote access with password required
  --locale C.UTF-8                     # defaults to system C.UTF-8 if available or en_US.utf8 if not

You can also pass the --locale C.UTF-8 option to change locales which might be useful for other languages.

🧰 Utilities

The AppImage also comes with every utility binary that comes with postgres, such as psql, initdb, vacuumdb and so on. For example:

./Postgres-12-aarch64.AppImage psql "postgresql://username:password@localhost:5431/postgres"

Will run a postgres shell.

🔨 Building From Source

I suggest doing this from within a docker container i.e. docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/data -it debian:buster /bin/bash otherwise it will install postgres on your local machine, and also because it's ideal to build AppImages on older distros such as Debian Buster so that modules like glibc are forward compatible.

Once up just run /data/build.sh and the build script will install postgres and build the AppImage. Artifacts are produced in the out folder and the generated AppImage in the dist folder.

🔮 Other Versions of Postgres

Right now this is only setup to build Postgres version 12, but in the future I plan on adding support for other versions too. If you want to take a shot at it, search this repo for references to 12 in build.sh and run.sh.