How To Install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL is a popular and powerful open-source relational database management system that has been adopted for running mission-critical applications. It supports a large part of the SQL standard and is designed to be extensible by users in many aspects. Some of the features are ACID transactions, foreign keys, views, sequences, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions, outer joins, and many more.

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 the PostgreSQL relational database management on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• 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 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

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 Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, PostgreSQL is available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest version of PostgreSQL to your system:

sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Once successfully installed, enable PostgreSQL (to start automatically upon system boot), start, and verify the status using the commands below:

sudo systemctl enable postgresql
sudo systemctl start postgresql
sudo systemctl status postgresql

Step 3. Secure PostgreSQL.

By default, PostgreSQL created a user called “postgres” and is not password-secured. Now we run the following command to generate a password for the “postgres” user account:

sudo passwd postgres

Next, using the Postgres system account, log in by running the command below:

su - postgres

Step 4. Connect PostgreSQL database server.

Once successfully installed, you can access a PostgreSQL prompt using the psql utility:

psql

Output:

postgres@crown:~$ psql
psql (15.0 (Ubuntu 22.04-1))
Type "help" for help.

postgres=#

Run the help command to view some command usages:

help

Exit out of the PostgreSQL prompt by typing:

\q

Step 5. Create Database.

To create a database, we will use the createdb command. If logged in to the postgres account, run the following command to create a new database:

sudo -u postgres createdb idroot

We can grant privileges to the user we just created on the database by running the following command:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE idroot TO username;

You can check the list of all databases with the \l command:

postgres-# \l
                                  List of databases
   Name    |  Owner   | Encoding |   Collate   |    Ctype    |   Access privileges
-----------+----------+----------+-------------+-------------+-----------------------
 idroot    | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =Tc/postgres         +
           |          |          |             |             | postgres=CTc/postgres+
           |          |          |             |             | username=CTc/postgres
 postgres  | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
 template0 | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/postgres          +
           |          |          |             |             | postgres=CTc/postgres
 template1 | postgres | UTF8     | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/postgres          +
           |          |          |             |             | postgres=CTc/postgres
(4 rows)

Step 6. Troubleshooting and Additional Resources.

In case you encounter any issues during the installation or while working with PostgreSQL, here are a few troubleshooting tips:

• Ensure that all the necessary dependencies are installed.
• Double-check your system requirements to ensure compatibility.
• Check the PostgreSQL documentation and community forums for specific error messages or issues.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PostgreSQL. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the PostgreSQL open-source database on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PostgreSQL website.