How to Install PostgreSQL on Arch-based Linux Distributions (Manjaro)

PostgreSQL (often called Postgres) is a free, open-source, and advanced relational database management system and is developed by The PostgreSQL Global Development Group. It is primarily written in the C Programming Language. In addition to SQL (relational) querying, Postgres also supports JSON (non-relational) querying.

This article is a step-by-step instruction for installing PostgreSQL on an Arch-based Linux system.

Installation of PostgreSQL

Step 1: Update and upgrade  your system by executing the following command

$ sudo pacman -Syu

Step 2: Install PostgreSQL from the official repository using pacman package manager

$ sudo pacman -S postgresql

Step 3: Verify the installation by running

$ postgres --version

Step 4: Using the initdb command, initialize PostgreSQL's data directory

initdb --locale $LANG -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data/'

Step 5: Start the PostgreSQL server by using systemctl command.

$ sudo systemctl start postgresql

$ sudo systemctl status postgresql

Step 6: Once again use systemctl command to enable PostgreSQL. Now, PostgreSQL will restart whenever your machine boots up.

$ sudo systemctl enable postgresql

Step 7: Now, log into the psql command-line interface with the default user 'postgres'

$ sudo -u postgres psql

Step 8: Create a new user with the following command

postgres=# CREATE USER <username> WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD '<password>';

Step 9: Create a new database with the following command

postgres=# CREATE DATABASE <dbname>;

Step 10: Finally, grant all permissions to the desired user on the newly created database.

postgres=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE <dbname> TO username;

At this point, you have successfully installed and configured PostgreSQL on your Linux machine.

Uninstallation of PostgreSQL

To uninstall PostgreSQL and all of its config files run

$ sudo pacman -Rcns postgresql