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createdb

Name

createdb — Create a new Postgres database

createdb [ options ] dbname [ description ]

Inputs

-h, --host host: Specifies the hostname of the machine on which the postmaster is running.
-p, --port port: Specifies the Internet TCP/IP port or local Unix domain socket file extension on which the postmaster is listening for connections.
-U, --username username: Username to connect as.
-W, --password: Force password prompt.
-e, --echo: Echo the queries that createdb generates and sends to the backend.
-q, --quiet: Do not display a response.
-D, --location datadir: Specifies the alternate database location for this database installation. This is the location of the installation system tables, not the location of this specific database, which may be different.
-E, --encoding encoding: Specifies the character encoding scheme to be used with this database.
dbname: Specifies the name of the database to be created. The name must be unique among all Postgres databases in this installation. The default is to create a database with the same name as the current system user.
description: This optionally specifies a comment to be associated with the newly created database.

The options -h, -p, -U, -W, and -e are passed on literally to psql.

Outputs

CREATE DATABASE: The database was successfully created.
createdb: Database creation failed.: (Says it all.)
createdb: Comment creation failed. (Database was created.): The comment/description for the database could not be created. the database itself will have been created already. You can use the SQL command COMMENT ON DATABASE to create the comment later on.

If there is an error condition, the backend error message will be displayed. See CREATE DATABASE and psql for possibilities.

Description

createdb creates a new Postgres database. The user who executes this command becomes the database owner.

createdb is a shell script wrapper around the SQL command CREATE DATABASE via the Postgres interactive terminal psql. Thus, there is nothing special about creating databases via this or other methods. This means that the psql must be found by the script and that a database server is running at the targeted host. Also, any default settings and environment variables available to psql and the libpq front-end library do apply.

Usage

To create the database demo using the default database server:

$ createdb demo
CREATE DATABASE

The response is the same as you would have gotten from running the CREATE DATABASE SQL command.

To create the database demo using the postmaster on host eden, port 5000, using the LATIN1 encoding scheme with a look at the underlying query:

$ createdb -p 5000 -h eden -E LATIN1 -e demo
CREATE DATABASE "demo" WITH ENCODING = 'LATIN1'
CREATE DATABASE

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