As I’m working on an array of projects with wildly differing technology stacks, I tend to switch between different development environments on my work machine. I used to keep a separate PostgreSQL installation per environment as a way to keep data close to the application. However, PostgreSQL is perfectly capable of accepting remote connections. The better approach is to have a single PostgreSQL instance directly installed on the host OS where all database live, serving as a single point of entry for all local projects.

This is a quick walkthrough on getting up and running with PostgreSQL on Fedora.

Step 1: Installation of PostgreSQL

Add the PostgreSQL yum repo:

sudo dnf install https://download.postgresql.org/pub/repos/yum/reporpms/F-34-x86_64/pgdg-fedora-repo-latest.noarch.rpm

Install PostgreSQL. Here I’m going with PostgreSQL 10.

sudo dnf install postgresql10-server postgresql10
sudo /usr/pgsql-10/bin/postgresql-10-setup initdb
sudo systemctl start postgresql-10
sudo systemctl enable postgresql-10

Step 2: Securing your local installation

The installation will create a postgres UNIX user on your system. Postgres is configured by default to log in with system user accounts.The postgres user is a superuser for PostgreSQL. The postgres user is setup without a password in PostgreSQL.

So, let’s change the password first by logging with psql and executing a SQL query:

sudo -i -u postgres
psql
> psql (10.21)
> Type "help" for help.
postgres=# alter user postgres with password 'postgres';
> ALTER ROLE

Step 3: Allow local access to PostgreSQL

Next up, we want to allow access from local connections to the PostgreSQL server. We’ll edit the /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/postgresql.conf file:

sudo vim /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/pg_hba.conf

Alter the IPv4 section so it reads:

# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            md5
host    all             all             localhost               md5

This allows connections from the loopback device as well as 127.0.0.1. The md5 modifier allows for authentication with PostgreSQL user accounts that aren’t tied to a system user.

You’ll need to change that if you want access to PostgreSQL on your host from a vagrant guest:

host    all             all             10.0.2.1/24             md5

Then connect from with your guest with the IP of your host in the database connection string. To find the IP of the host from within the guest:

netstat -rn | grep "^0.0.0.0 " | cut -d " " -f10

Step 4: creating users and database

Here we create a database user netsensei and a new database called netsensei. We also make the new user owner of the new database. Also notice how we’re setting the collation during creation.

sudo -i -u postgres
# e.g. netsensei
createuser --interactive
createdb netsensei -O netsensei -T template0 -l en_US.UTF-8 -E UTF8

Let’s set the privileges on the database via psql:

sudo -i -u postgres
psql
> psql (10.21)
> Type "help" for help.
postgres=# grant all privileges on database netsensei to netsensei ;
> GRANT