Setting up a PostgreSQL database¶

This section will give some guidance to setting up a PostgreSQL server for SimDB. If PostgreSQL is already set up and running on the machine this section can be skipped and the connection details set in the SimDB configuration file. This is not intended to be an exhaustive guide to PostgreSQL (more details can be found on the PostgreSQL website).

Installing PostgreSQL¶

PostgreSQL should be installed from an available system package. This should install the database and create the default data directory (/var/lib/pgsql/data on CentOS Linux). The PostgreSQL service should then be started and enabled on the system (system postgres start and system postgres enable on Linux).

Connecting to PostgreSQL¶

The SimDB server will need to be able to connect to the database. You can test this connection using:

import psycopg2
psycopg2.connect("postgresql://simdb@<HOST>:<PORT>")

replacing <HOST> with the PostgreSQL hostname and <PORT> with the PostgreSQL port, e.g. "postgresql://simdb@localhost:5432".

If you have issue connecting to a localhost database then you may need to check your pg_hba.conf in the PostgreSQL data folder and check the connection setting is set to trust rather than ident.