Re: forking postmaster on my own - not as pguser

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Gregory Stone wrote:

> I have a need to run postgres only when my Java application is running.
> Basically I want to do a Runtime.exec() from java in order to start up the
> DB server. Is there any reason why this should present a problem? My
> init.d script is su-ing to the pguser before launching pg_ctl with all the
> various params. Can I just emulate this, but not su to the pguser account
> but use the exisitng user logon? Also, besides standard unix safety rules
> about limited access accounts and all, is there any reason I HAVE to be
> the pguser to start up postgres?

No need to be the pguser user at all. Any user of the system can run a postgres
cluster. Note, that is a postgres cluster, i.e. if you're trying to start
postgres to look at databases in a cluster that was built by a different user
then it isn't going to work.

So in summary, what you want to do is something like:

initdb -D /home/myuser/data blah blah blah
pg_ctl -D /home/myuser/data blah blah blah
createdb -D /home/myuser/data blah blah blah
all the other stuff to build your DBs and then you just need to fork and exec
as myuser in your application.

--
Nigel Andrews