How To Install PostgreSQL on Linux Mint 20

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL is a relational database management system that provides an implementation of the SQL querying language. It’s standards-compliant and has many advanced features like reliable transactions and concurrency without reading locks.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of PostgreSQL on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install PostgreSQL on Linux Mint 20 Ulyana

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing PostgreSQL on Linux Mint.

Let’s install the Postgresql server using the following command:

sudo apt install postgresql

Wait until the installation process is complete. By default, the PostgreSQL service is started automatically after the installation. You can confirm if it is running with the command:

sudo systemctl status postgresql

Step 3. PostgreSQL Roles and Databases.

Both user and group are presented as term roles in PostgreSQL for handling database access permissions. Ident, Trust, Password and Peer are different methods for authentication in PostgreSQL. Ident the method is mainly used on TCP/IP connections while Trust the method used to connect without a password using the given criteria in pg_hba.conf file.

Step 4. Accessing the PostgreSQL command prompt.

Once installing the PostgreSQL database server, by default, it creates a user ‘postgres’ with role ‘postgres’. It also creates a system account with the same name ‘postgres’. So to connect to the Postgres server, log in to your system as a user of Postgres and connect database:

su - postgres
psql

Now you are logged in to the PostgreSQL database server. To check login info use the following command from the database command prompt:

postgres-# \conninfo

To disconnect from the PostgreSQL database command prompt just type the below command and press enter. It will return you back to the Ubuntu command prompt:

postgres-# \q

Create a new user and database:

### For example, let us create a new user called “meilana” with password “ranty”, and database called “rantydb”. ###
sudo -u postgres createuser -D -A -P ranty
sudo -u postgres createdb -O ranty meilanadb

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PostgreSQL. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of PostgreSQL on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PostgreSQL website.